Frequently Asked Questions
Note: For questions on using Chinese on the computer, please visit the Chinese Computing website.- How do I read Chinese on Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer?
- How do I display and type Chinese on my computer?
- Are the programs on this web site available for licensing? Do you do consulting work?
- What are GB, Big5 and Unicode? How do you convert between them?
- Where did you learn Chinese?
- Is there software that can translate between English and Chinese?
- Is there any software that can translate English to Pinyin?
- Can you translate a Chinese word or phrase for me?
- What are the Chinese characters for the English alphabet?
- In what direction is Chinese written?
- What are the differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters?
- What do the numbers means in the Chinese pronunciations on this site?
- Can you send me a list of all the Chinese characters? Can you teach me how to look up a character I've found on a picture/painting/vase/etc.?
- Will China switch from using characters to pinyin?
- How do you say "I love you" in Chinese?
- How do you say "Hello" in Chinese?
- I've heard the Chinese word for crisis is made up of the words for danger and opportunity. Can you tell me more?
- What is the history behind the phrase "gung ho"? How is it written in characters?
- Is "May you live in interesting times" really a Chinese curse?
- Why does your Chinese name tool keep giving me different names?
- Why does your name tool/calendar converter say I was born in the year of the X when I heard I was born in the year of the Y?
- I recently learned the name of the child I'm adopting from China. Can you tell me what the Chinese name means?
- What web resources can help me learn Mandarin Chinese?
- Are there web resources for learning Chinese using Spanish, German, French, etc.?
- What handheld computer programs (e.g. PocketPC, PalmPilot) exist to help me learn Chinese?
- What web resources can help me learn Cantonese?
- What resources exist to help children learn Chinese?
- Could you tell me how to say my name or some other word in Chinese? Could you send me a picture of "some phrase" translated into Chinese?
How do I read Chinese on Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer?
Both of these browsers can support Chinese without any other programs. All you need is the right font, and there are many good free fonts you can download. For Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME, the best method is to download Microsoft's free Chinese fonts and input methods for Simplified and Traditional Chinese. For Windows 2000 and XP, Chinese support is built in and just needs to be activated.
Installing these language packs will automatically set up Internet Explorer for Chinese. Netscape 4 still needs one more step. From Netscape's main menu, select "Edit", then "Preferences". In the window that appears, select "Appearance" and "Fonts". First select "Simplified Chinese" for the encoding, and choose "MS Song" or "MS Hei" for the proportional and fixed length fonts. For the "Traditional Chinese Encoding", select "MingLiU" as the font. Selecting a larger font size might also be easier on your eyes.
Now as you surf around different Chinese websites, two situations may occur. Some web pages "know" that they are in Chinese, and the browser automatically knows to use the Chinese fonts to display them. For web pages that do not have this information, you can manually change to Chinese. On Netscape, this is done from "View" and then "Character Set" on the main menu. On Internet Explorer, this can be done from "View" and then "Fonts", or in later versions "View" then "Encodings".
These fonts will also allow you to read (in Netscape Messenger and Outlook) and write (in Outlook and Netscape 4.72 and above) Chinese in e-mails.
There are other fonts you can use on Windows instead of the Microsoft fonts. One possibility is the Bitstream Cyberbit font. The above method should also work with browsers on other operating systems after obtaining Chinese fonts.
How do I display and type Chinese on my computer?
Both Windows
2000 and Windows
XP already include Chinese support. It just needs to be turned
on. Microsoft also sells versions of Windows where the interface is in Chinese.
If you already have an English of Windows 95/98/ME, then you can use a
program that adds Chinese capabilities to your existing programs.
Program like this include
TwinBridge Chinese Partner and
UnionWay for Windows and the Chinese Language Kit (CLK) for
Macintosh that comes with MacOS 9. Visit the Chinese Mac Home for more on using Chinese on the Mac. I don't know of a program like
this for Unix.
For an increasing number of programs, all you need is a Chinese font
to display Chinese. These programs incude Netscape Communicator,
Office 97/2000/XP, and Microsoft Explorer. You can find both
simplified and traditional Chinese fonts from Microsoft.
Are the programs on this web site available for licensing? Do you
do consulting work on Chinese computing?
What are GB, Big5 and Unicode? How do you convert between them?
Computers don't speak any languages, they only know numbers. In
order for computers to work with human languages such as Chinese and
English, special mappings between numbers and letters or characters
are made into standards that various computers and programs
understand. These agreed upon ways of using Chinese are called
characters sets or code sets. GB (short for "Guojia Biaozhun" or
"National Standard") is the standard used in the People's Republic of
China and Singapore and it has a set of about 7,000 simplified Chinese
characters. Big5 is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong and has about 13,000
traditional Chinese characters. Unicode is an emerging standard that
attempts to encode all the major languages, including Chinese.
Unicode includes all the characters from GB and Big5. A character set
is different from a font that supports that character set. You may
have a document written using GB, but to view it you need a font that
includes all the GB characters. Viewing a GB encoded document as if
it were in Big5 will produce garbage on the screen. Viewing a Chinese
document on a program that thinks it is in English will also produce
an unintelligible document with lots of accented letters and symbols.
The characters in Unicode are a superset of the characters in GB
and Big5 so it is easy to convert directly from GB or Big5 into
Unicode. However, while there is some overlap between GB and Big5,
there are also many simplified characters in GB that are not in Big5,
and many traditional characters in Big5 that are not in GB.
Consequently, conversion between GB and Big5 is not trivial, since
many simplified characters map to multiple Big5 traditional
equivalents. Going from Big5 to GB is easier, since the conversion
from traditional to simplified is much less ambiguous. For more
information on conversion, see the encodings page at
ChineseComputing.com .
Where did you learn Chinese?
I first learned Mandarin Chinese as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints in
Houston, Texas during the early 1990's. I have also spent time in
Nanjing and Guangzhou in China and majored in Chinese at Brigham Young
University. I enjoy the language and Chinese culture and have created
this site to share this beautiful language with others.
Is there software to translate between English and Chinese?
Translation systems can provide the gist of the original text,
but still do not provide a natural, complete translation.
So, I wouldn't recommend trying to carry out business
communication or pen pal exchanges using them. The free
options for English/Chinese translation software are also very limited.
In most situations, you still need a human.
One page that lists several different translation systems is
Chinese Software Digest.
Other possibilities are
EV Dict,
Alexander Chinese to English Software,
RoboWord English-Chinese Software,
TransPerfect, or
Systran, but I haven't tried them myself.
If you want a portable translator, try the
Besta Handheld Translator.
An on-line English/Chinese automatic translation I know of is the IBM
English/Chinese translation engine, where all the instructions are
in English. AltaVista's Babelfish also now supports
translation to and from Chinese from English.
Is any there software to translate between English and Pinyin?
Not that I know of, unfortunately. There are systems that will
translate between English and Chinese in characters (see the machine translation answer above). There are also some
systems that convert characters to pinyin. See the Chinese text
annotator.
Unfortunately, both kinds of conversions are imperfect. No machine
translation system can yet achieve anywhere near human quality. Also,
many Chinese characters have multiple possible pronunciations,
depending on the context in which they are used. So the output of any
English to pinyin system would not likely be very useful.
There are several programs that try to make reading Chinese easier by
facilitating the look up in a dictionary of words in a Chinese text.
Many people find the program Wenlin useful. With it you quickly
find definitions of Chinese words along with their pinyin. Other
similar tools include Clavis
Sinica and my own DimSum. Also
see the on-line service at Waiyu.org.
What are the Chinese equivalents for the English alphabet?
There really aren't any. Chinese uses characters to represent the
sounds of its language, with one character per syllable (and usually
morpheme), as opposed to English which has a letter for each
individual sound (more or less). There are approximately five to
seven thousand Chinese characters in common use. So asking for the
equivalent characters to the English alphabet is a meaningless
question. Some systems do exist to transcribe the sounds of Chinese.
The most popular of these, Hanyu pinyin, uses the same Latin alphabet
as English. Another system, called the National Phonetic Symbols (or
BoPoMoFo after the first four letters) and mostly used in Taiwan, does
use unique Chinese symbols for the sounds of the Chinese language.
However, it is mostly used only by students of the language and in
dictionaries. Many Chinese even in Taiwan cannot read it. So I do
not recommend trying to use it for anything, especially tattoos. More
information on the National Phonetic Symbol system is available.
In what direction is Chinese written?
Traditionally, Chinese was written from top to bottom and then
right to left. This is still the method preferred in Taiwan, but the
People's Republic of China has switched to the European style of left
to right, top to bottom.
What are the differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters?
Chinese characters have been evolving throughout their usage. In
the 1950's, the Chinese Communist government sped this process up by
starting a program of massive character simplification with the goal
of improving literacy rates. This involved replacing characters with
new forms that required fewer strokes to write or combining several
characters into just one form. Sources for the new simplified
characters included common handwritten short forms, archaic character
variants, and other characters with the same pronunciation.
Simplified characters are currently used in mainland China and
Singapore, while traditional characters are still in use in Hong Kong,
Taiwan, and older overseas Chinese communities. In Taiwan the
traditional characters are also refered to as "orthodox characters" by
some. Given the mainland's sheer size, simplified characters have a
much larger population using them, but a knowledge of traditional
characters is still important for reading classical Chinese literature
and interacting with many Chinese groups outside the mainland.
What do the numbers mean in the Chinese pronunciations on this site?
Chinese characters themselves do not contain an accurate indication
of how they should be pronounced. To indicate pronunciations, a system
called "hanyu pinyin" is commonly used, especially in mainland China.
One feature of spoken Chinese is something called tones. Each Chinese
syllable can means something different depending on the pitch and pitch
changes with which it is said. Mandarin Chinese has four tones. In the
first a word is spoken at higher end of ones range. In the second, one
starts low and then rises higher. In the third, one starts in the middle
of ones range, dips down and then rises again. In the fourth, one starts
near the top of one's range, the drops quickly. In normal pinyin, these
tones are indicated with tone marks which are little lines above the main
vowel of the syllable. These marks can be hard to display on all computers,
so a common practice is to add a number after the syllable to indicate the
tone. For more information on tones and pinyin, see the section on
Mandarin pronunciation
at Chinese Outpost.
Can you send me a list of all the Chinese characters? Can you
teach me how to look up a character I've found on a
picture/painting/vase/etc.?
Chinese has many thousands of characters and it takes some training
in order look one up by its shape. Characters share many components
in common and each character has a prominent unit called the radical.
In traditional dictionaries, you can look up a character by first
finding its radical and then counting the remaining number of strokes
needed to write the character. The dictionary has an index by radical
and stroke count that you can then use to find the character. You can
search by radical/stroke, pronunciation or English meaning at this
site's character dictionary, but it is
designed as an Chinese to English dictionary, and not the other way
around. Another good place to try is Zhongwen.com. And you can also scan
a picture of it and send it to me.
If you want an English font that looks Chinese, try the
Rickshaw
font.
Will China switch from using characters to pinyin?
In the early years of the communist revolution in China, there was
a lot of discussion about replacing characters with pinyin, under the
theory that pinyin was a lot easier to use than characters. The
government adopted pinyin as the official romanization and many books
and signs added pinyin next to the characters. However, currently
(and in the foreseeable future) there are no plans to replace
characters with pinyin. There are several reasons for this.
There's also a book called "Chinese Language: Fact and
Fantasy" by John DeFrancis that has a in-depth discussion of
this topic.
English/Chinese MT Software
English to Chinese MT Web Services
Chinese to English MT Web Services
For these and other reasons, it is very unlikely China
will switch over to pinyin in our lifetimes. Personally,
I like characters too. I'm not saying there are no
advantages to using pinyin (I think there are), just that
the advantages don't currently outweigh the disadvantages.
The Chinese for "I love you" sounds something like "wo eye knee"
(usually spelt "wo ai ni"). The Chinese character for love includes
the symbol for "heart" in its center.
 "good fortune, blessings" |
 "love" |
 "longetivity, old age" |
 "the way, Daoism" |
 "friendship" |
How do you say "Hello" in Chinese?
Ni hao. (sounds like "knee how")
I've heard the Chinese word for crisis is made up of the words for danger and
opportunity. Can you tell me more?
While this may make a great story, it's not really true. The two characters
that make up the Chinese word for crisis can mean "danger" and "opportunity" now,
but this wasn't the original meaning. But, it is a great story, so here are the
two characters (spelt "wei ji").
Also see the following links:
What is the history behind the phrase "gung ho"? How is it written in characters?
Is "May you live in interesting times" really a Chinese curse?
If it is then the Chinese themselves have never heard of it. A number
of people have looked into the origin of this saying and no Chinese
scholars have been able to find a Chinese equivalent. Here is a full article
on the subject. Also see this Wikipedia article for more on the origins of the phrase.
Why does your Chinese name tool keep giving me different names?
English and Chinese are two completely unrelated languages. They
don't share a common linguistic or cultural history. One of the
differences is in the way names are given. Chinese has a relatively
small set of surnames for people and no set of common given names.
Given names can be chosen from the whole language, though in practice
some characters are used more often than others. What this means is
that there is no standard way of translating a name from English into
Chinese. You can try to pick a given name that sounds like your
English name, or you can pick a name with characters whose meaning you
like. This is not unique, and will differ based on personal
preference. That is why the name tool will give you a different name
each time you use it, so you can choose the one you like the best.
There isn't a "right" translation of an English name. So far from
being a bug or "hidden feature" in the namer, it is a conscious design
choice.
Some sites purport to translate your name into Chinese, but only
pick a stock, meaningless transliteration of the name. It may use
Chinese characters, but it is not a Chinese name and would not be used
by a native Chinese as a name. A Chinese name has a one (or less
commonly two) character surname followed by a one or two character
given name and it differs from person to person. My namer tries to do
a slightly better job, but to get a good Chinese name, you still need
to talk to a human, preferably one who knows your personality.
Why does your name tool/calendar converter say I was born in the
year of the X when I heard I was born in the year of the Y?
The Chinese Zodiac has twelve animals (Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit,
Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Chicken, Dog, and Pig) and each
year is assigned an animal. I was born in the year of the Dog.
The Chinese calendar is based on the cycles of the moon and starts
on different dates in the Western calendar each year. The Chinese
New Year will fall sometime between January 21 and Feburary 21.
On this website I go by the Chinese calendar to determine the Zodiac
sign, and not the Western calendar. That is why the Zodiac sign
returned by this site might be different from what you expect if you
were born in January or early February.
I recently learned the name of the child I'm adopting from China.
Can you tell me what the name means?
First of all, congratulations on the adoption! I think
Chinese kids (especially little Chinese girls with red
cheeks and ponytails) are the cutest things in the world.
Many people learn the spelling of the child's name but have no way of
getting the characters. The spelling will use a system called
"pinyin" , which is how Chinese is written using the Latin
alphabet. This is where the x's, q's and z's that give American's so
much trouble come from. In Chinese culture, the surname comes first,
so the first word in the name is likely the surname (unless the agency
"helpfully" switched the order for you :). Everything that follows is
the given name. While Chinese has a relatively limited set of
surnames (see the Chinese surnames
site), given names can be drawn from the whole language. In
addition, one sound in Chinese can be represented using many different
characters, each with a different meaning. Furthermore, each Chinese
syllable can have four separate tones, where a different tone
changes the meaning. The tones are not probably not included with the
pinyin.
So the upside of all this is that while it is likely you can identify
the surname from only the pinyin, it is unlikely you could get the
meaning of the given name with only the pinyin and not the characters.
If you want to see all the possibilities for the pinyin, try the Chinese character
dictionary. Type the pinyin (one syllable per look up!) in the
pinyin field and search. Pick the character whose meaning you like
the most.
If you do get a copy of the characters
for the name, feel free to send me a picture of them to
translate. Good luck with the new addition to your family!
What web resources can help me learn Chinese?
Many web pages (including mine) exist to help people learn Chinese.
The best listing of these pages is Learning Chinese
Online. Another excellent introductory site is the Mandarin Chinese Outpost.
Jordan's China Handbook
has a more academic description of the Chinese language.
Web-based study will only take you so far though. I recommend trying
find some native speakers willing to help you and having a language
exchange with them. See if your local community college or university
offers classes in Chinese. And, as tempting as it is, concentrate on
learning how to speak before learning Chinese characters.
Are there web resources for learning Chinese using Spanish, German, French, etc.?
Try Chine-Nouvelle.com for Chinese and French, Chino-China.com for Chinese and Spanish, and Chinesisch-Lernen.org for Chinese and German. For Japanese, try Gakira.com.
What handheld computer programs (e.g. PocketPC, PalmPilot) exist to help me learn Chinese?
There's Chinese
Flashcards, Dragon Character
Training, and study
aids for the PalmPilot. For Chinese dictionaries, there is the Oxford Concise E&C/C&E Dictionary,
the CEDICT
Chinese/English dictionary look-up tool for the Palm and HNHSoft English-Chinese Dictionary
for PDAs and phones. For the PocketPC,
KingKanji says it can help students learn simplified characters.
For general links on using Chinese on handhelds, see the Handheld
page at ChineseComputing.com.
What web resources can help me learn Cantonese?
The best place to start is the home page of the Cantonese Language
Association. Another good place to start is the Cantonese Help Sheets.
Also see the
Cantonese Language Profile and a list
of schools that teach Cantonese. I do not speak Cantonese myself
and so do not plan on adding any Cantonese-specific resources to this
website.
What resources exist to help children learn Chinese?
Some websites exist specifically for children learning Chinese and
sell various learning books and tapes for studying Chinese language
and culture. These include
Chinese Children's Books, Shen's
Bookstore, Asia for Kids, AsianParent.com (Chinese children's Books and DVDs for 0-12 year olds)
and China Sprout. China Books and Periodicals also
has a children's section. The Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission of
Taiwan has a site for Overseas
Chinese Internet Education.
ChineseTide offers Chinese courses for children and teens.
Could you tell me how to say my name or some other word in Chinese? Could you send me a
picture of "some phrase" translated into Chinese?
Translation is an exacting process and it can be hard to tell what
meaning you want, even for a short phrase. Also, as a non-native
speaker of Chinese, I might miss the nuances and proper way of saying
what you want. Finally, producing pictures of Chinese is a
time-consuming process. For these reasons, I generally do not respond
to requests for translations or tattoo help. However, I do make
available many resources you can use to look up words. Most useful of
these is the Chinese-English
dictionary. You can also try Zhongwen.com. To translate your name,
visit the Get
a Chinese Name page.
As a final note for tattoo seekers, I would caution people against
trusting a stranger to give them a picture that they will have
permanently drawn into their skin.
The term 'Gung-Ho' (literally "work together" and spelt "gonghe" in
pinyin) was borrowed by LtCol Carlson, the Commanding Officer of
the 2nd Raider Battalion in WWII, after his tour of duty as a military
advisor to the Chinese prior to the outbreak of hostilities. He was so
impressed with them he brought their philosophy with him and
incorporated it into his new command. Marines today still use the
term and try to hold true to its idea. (From an e-mail by SSgt Timothy
A. Williams) For an alternate explanation of the phrase's origin, see
this site on Gung
Ho Co-operatives.