Chinese names are so much better than English names

I love Chinese names.

It always makes me so sad when Chinese people insist that I call them by their English name. Especially when their English name is Fan or Bracken or Cherry or Candy. It also always makes me really sad when Americans make fun of Chinese names ("Haha his name is Wang Dong! What a weird name! I can't pronounce those weird Chinese names!"). The reason is because Chinese names have meaning. I mean, really, really cool meanings. For example, I remember one day Adam asked me how to pronounce the name of one kid in his physics group, Xiaolong. "It's pronounced "Sh-Ow Long. It means Little Dragon," I told him. I also have a friend here named "Little Tiger" and his English name is the best: Tiger.

Whenever I meet a new Chinese person, I always ask them to enter their Chinese name and phone number into my cell phone so I can more easily remember their name (and contact them later if I need something heehee). I can easily remember their name after that because Chinese names are just so awesome.

I left out the surnames of the following names for two reasons. Firstly, it protects anonymity. Secondly, surnames in China are similar to American surnames in the sense that they usually don't really carry any meaning (Wang means "king", Shi means "rock", Tian means "field"), ie they don't have cool meanings like first names do. They are different from American surnames, however, in that there are only certain characters that can be used as surnames, and this can sometimes give you a hint of where that person is originally from. That is a story for another day, however. First names can be either one or two characters long.

Disclaimer: Chinese characters usually have about 5 different meanings, so if one of my Chinese-speaker readers would like to correct me, please feel free. I put an "and" between the two character names if the words in English don't make sense together. I put a slash if one character has two appropriate meanings in English.

Cool names of my friends and what they mean:

蕴茜 – Yunqian – Profound and Madder (Madder is a southwest Asian herb with small yellow flowers, evergreen leaves, and a red root).

 敏 － Min － Smart

欣怡 – Xinyi – Happy Harmony

笑 – Xiao - Smile

乐 – Le - Happy

雨琪 – Yuqi – Rain and (a type of) Jade

晓钰 – Xiaoyu – Dawn and Rare Treasure

华 – Hua - Magnificent

骏博 – Junbo – Noble Steed and Well-Learned*

颍萍 - Yingping – Ying is a place in Anhui province and Ping means "wandering or traveling"

淑文 – Shuwen – Pure/Charming and Cultured

娟 – Juan – Beautiful/Graceful

丽茹 – Liru – Beautiful/Magnificent and Vegetables/Roots (not sure where that one came from)

盈新 – Yingxin – Surplus/Overflowing of Fresh

晓虹 – Xiaohong – Dawn Rainbow

*The character jun, meaning noble steed, is a way to say "a great and noble guy."

Chinese word of the day: 

沟通 - gou1 tong1, literally "to connect or go through a ditch or ravine", aka to communicate