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Type Name Latest commit message Commit time README.md alphabetized Chinese chart Jul 26, 2021 View code Pronouncing Non-English Names For English Speakers General Chinese common given name components Japanese common names with tricky pronunciations README.md Pronouncing Non-English Names For English Speakers A practical guide to how to pronounce non-English names for English speakers The goal of this guide is to produce a simple guide to help you pronounce a surname from a non-English speaking culture that sounds reasonably correct. In this guide, we will provide reasonable approximations using sounds that are already familiar to English speakers. Learning to produce non-English sounds is out of scope for this document, but lots of fun and I highly recommend it. General Rule #1 for pronouncing someone's name is what the person in question says the pronunciation of their name is should override this document! For example, in the US, many families that immigrated many years ago have changed the way their name was pronounced from its original heritage pronunciation. That's totally fine! Use their pronunciation! There's an important non-obvious caveat here though. If you are not a native speaker of the language of the person, you should not assume your brain can hear their pronunciation accurately to reproduce it. Many languages have sounds that simply do not appear in English and if you don't speak those languages, your brain will try its best to map it to English sounds. It will frequently fail badly. If you've never seriously studied a foreign language, you may have never had this experience before, but it is very real. One way to get an intuition for this is to think about how many song lyrics you've later realized you've misheard in your native language. Chinese Chinese is a complicated subject and the goal of this guide is to be practical and simple. The vast majority of Chinese people in the world today writing their names using the English alphabet use a system called Pinyin. You can be confident when using this guide with people who were born in mainland China after 1950 or so but use caution with people from Taiwan, or people who emigrated from China before those periods. Cantonese speakers (especially from Hong Kong) are also not covered here (yet). First, if you can remember only 3 things: 1. Zh is like a J sound (as in "Jam") 2. X is like a Sh sound (as in "Shot") 3. Q is like a Ch sound (as in "China") These just need to be memorized. The sound most English speakers guess in these cases is to make them sounds like the Zh sound in the middle consonant in the English word "measure". This is very wrong and because that sound gets used for all of them (and J) it can be very confusing. The good news about Chinese surnames for English speakers is that there are very few of them. The word for "the masses" in Chinese (Bai Jia Xing ) can be literally translated as "the old 100 surnames" because of how few there are. Even better news is that the top 20 surnames account for more than 54% of all Chinese people's surnames. Here's the top 20 with the tricky ones explained: Rank Pinyin Pronunciation Tricks 1 Wang has an "ah" vowel. Wahng 2 Li 3 Zhang Zh = J, "ah" vowel. Jahng 4 Liu sounds like "leeoh" 5 Chen rhymes with "fun" in US, in UK rhymes with the second syllable of London 6 Yang has an "ah" vowel. Yahng 7 Huang 8 Wu 9 Zhao J sound, rhymes with "wow". Jow 10 Zhou J sound, same as English name "Joe" 11 Xu same as English word "shoe" 12 Su 13 Ma 14 Zhu same as English word "Jew" 15 Hu 16 Lin 17 Guo take the first syllable in "water" and put a G sound in front. "Gwaww" 18 He a trickster! pronounced like the interjection "huh!" 19 Gao rhymes with "wow" 20 Luo takes the first syllable in "water" and put an L sound in front. "Lwaww" common given name components The Chinese have a wide array of possible given names, but many characters with nice meanings (e.g. beautiful, tranquil, great) are used commonly. We list a few tricky common ones in this chart Name Pronunciation Fang Fahng Feng Fuhng Gang Gahng Gui Gway Hai english "Hi!" Jing literally just "jing". not zhing. Jie Jee-ay, all one syllable Jun Joon Qiang Chee-ah-ng, all one syllable Yang Yahng Yong Yohng Xiao the first syllable in "Shower" Xiu same as english "show" Finally, be careful with the letter 'c' in Pinyin names. It represents the ending consonant in "its". In names you will see "Cai" which is pronounced "Ts-eye". Japanese Japanese romanization of names is very standardized and regular. Japanese pronunciation is one of the most covered topics on the Internet but this is a practical guide for non-experts so we're going to intentionally ignore things like pitch accent, stess vs. syllable timing and just look at a few of the more common gotchas. Vowels are relatively few and straightforward. Vowel Pronunciation a ah e eh i ee o oh u oo * Watch out for combinations with the letter y. kya, kyu, kyo, nya, ryo, and many more combinations. The y is never pronounced like an "i" in english. Each of those are pronounced as a single syllable in English and the y "flavors" the consonant. The way English speakers say Tokyo as 'Toh-Kee-Oh' is the mistake you want to avoid here. Toh-kyoh. * if you see the letter combination "tsu", your initial instinct might be to break it up between the t and s, but this is a single sound that is the same as the final consonant 'its' combined with the 'oo' vowel. Example: not Mit-su-bi-shi (Mit-soo-bee-shee) but Mi-tsu-bi-shi (Mee-tsoo-bee-shee). common names with tricky pronunciations Name Pronunciation Notes Yamashita Yah-MAH-sh-Ta some vowels (i, u) get removed (called devoicing), this common name has it Kyoko Kyoh-koh (not Kee-oh-koh) Ryousuke Ryoh-skeh the -suke suffix is usually skeh --------------------------------------------------------------------- by Steve Carroll feedback, suggestions, and contributions very welcome About A practical guide to how to pronounce non-English names for English speakers Resources Readme Releases No releases published Packages 0 No packages published * (c) 2021 GitHub, Inc. * Terms * Privacy * Security * Status * Docs * Contact GitHub * Pricing * API * Training * Blog * About You can't perform that action at this time. You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session. You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.