Frequently Asked Questions

Note: For questions on using Chinese on the computer, please visit the Chinese Computing website.
  1. How do I read Chinese on Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer?
  2. How do I display and type Chinese on my computer?
  3. Are the programs on this web site available for licensing? Do you do consulting work?
  4. What are GB, Big5 and Unicode? How do you convert between them?
  5. Where did you learn Chinese?
  6. Is there software that can translate between English and Chinese?
  7. Is there any software that can translate English to Pinyin?
  8. Can you translate a Chinese word or phrase for me?
  9. What are the Chinese characters for the English alphabet?
  10. In what direction is Chinese written?
  11. What are the differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters?
  12. What do the numbers means in the Chinese pronunciations on this site?
  13. 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.?
  14. Will China switch from using characters to pinyin?
  15. How do you say "I love you" in Chinese?
  16. How do you say "Hello" in Chinese?
  17. I've heard the Chinese word for crisis is made up of the words for danger and opportunity. Can you tell me more?
  18. What is the history behind the phrase "gung ho"? How is it written in characters?
  19. Is "May you live in interesting times" really a Chinese curse?
  20. Why does your Chinese name tool keep giving me different names?
  21. 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?
  22. I recently learned the name of the child I'm adopting from China. Can you tell me what the Chinese name means?
  23. What web resources can help me learn Mandarin Chinese?
  24. Are there web resources for learning Chinese using Spanish, German, French, etc.?
  25. What handheld computer programs (e.g. PocketPC, PalmPilot) exist to help me learn Chinese?
  26. What web resources can help me learn Cantonese?
  27. What resources exist to help children learn Chinese?
  28. 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?
You can also read an Ukranian translation of this FAQ.


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?

Amazon Honor System Click Here to
  Pay Learn More Yes and yes. There are many libraries in this site that can be incorporated into other Chinese-related programs for a small licensing fee. I also do custom Chinese-related programming and consulting for companies. E-mail me at "erik AT chinesecomputing.com" for more information. Also, if you enjoy the tools on this website, please considering contributing money towards their further development by clicking on the image to the right or left. You can also help by buying from the
Chinese Tools store.

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.

English/Chinese MT Software

English to Chinese MT Web Services

Chinese to English MT Web Services

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.

  1. There are hundreds of different dialects in China. Characters have served as a unifying force amongst all of these separate languages.
  2. Pinyin is a reflection of the pronunciation of the Mandarin dialect of Chinese. While this is the main cultural and political language in China and Taiwan (and growing in importance in Hong Kong), there are many people who only speak their own native dialects and not Mandarin. While the government has been working over the years to teach Mandarin to the whole country, it is still not widespread enough to dispense with characters altogether.
  3. Characters have a long and important role in Chinese culture. Drawing characters is considered an art form in itself. Characters are intrinsically Chinese, while pinyin uses a "foreign" alphabet.
  4. There are an enormous numbers of books already printed in characters. If you make your whole country illiterate in characters, you lose an important connection to the past and a wealth of information that might never get translated into pinyin.
  5. Computers are making it easier to work with Chinese. One of the early arguments for switching to pinyin was that it was much easier for computers to process, but recent advances in computing have made characters almost as easy to process as English. A computer alphabet called Unicode is an important part of this.
  6. Taiwan and Hong Kong would never switch.
  7. Chinese has many homophones. Different characters help reduce ambiguity in written Chinese. If you switch to pinyin, the writing gains a degree of ambiguity. Classical and formal styles of Chinese would be unintelligible in pinyin.
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.

There's also a book called "Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" by John DeFrancis that has a in-depth discussion of this topic.

How do you say "I love you" in Chinese?

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.

Can you translate a Chinese word or phrase for me?

Generally I'm happy to try to respond to these requests. You can send reasonably sized pictures of Chinese characters as e-mail attachments. Please don't ask to send pictures to me via physical mail. Please bear in mind that I'm not a native speaker and that there are cursive styles of Chinese that I have trouble reading.

    If all you have is the English spelling of something in Chinese, especially a name, then due to the high number of homonyms in Chinese, it is unlikely I will be able to give an accurate translation. Characters are the only sure way to get a definite translation.

Here's a few of the most common characters used on necklaces and bracelets:


"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?

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.

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.