Well, despite being almost two weeks behind the class, today was pretty good. The class(es) are taught mostly in Mandarin, and predominantly through a mixture of pinyin (romanization with tones/accents) and Chinese characters.
My Chinese name [thanks to Chen Yiling for the brilliant name] is (in pinyin) Luó Chăng or, in characters, 罗昶 where –
“Luó” is the surname, and sounds a little bit like the word for the Internet (wǎng luò) and also sounds a bit like the “Ro” in “Rob” and “Chăng’ which means “bright” or “long day”.
Toni’s Chinese name (in pinyin) is Tóng Shān Shān which, originally, in Mandarin is 童姗姗 but we have changed it to 童珊珊 instead because 姗 means “deprecated” and 珊 means “coral” which is much nicer. Tóng is the surname, which sounds a little bit like “Toni”.
I’m using the CC-CEDICT English-Chinese dictionary in combination with the freeware Pablo user interface which has a neat little area for mouse/pen drawing for symbol (character) recognition which includes stroke order demonstrations.
Highly recommended and, dare I say it – free tools to help with Chinese Pinyin –> Characters –> English translations.
I’ll write up some more about class next week when I recommence on Monday.
How do they decide your Chinese name? Do you guys just make one up? Also shouldn’t you both have the same surname?
Ooh I should tell my Dad about that software!