Presentation of Chinese Words & Names

Here is a quick rundown of how Chinese terms and proper names are presented on the site and in the companion book.  A lot of extra blood, sweat and tears—and probably carpal tunnel—went into adding Chinese characters and Romanizations for EVERY single Mandarin word I present. I have done this to help Mandarin learners to 1) correctly pronounce Chinese words and 2) learn how to write them, and also to help native speakers in case you fail in either one or two. In such cases, your Taiwanese counterpart can simply look at the Chinese charactes on the page to figure out what you are talking about. But for the sake of actually learning the language, I highly suggest that you at least try their hand at saying the word first.

Romanization

This site and the companion book use the “Hanyu Pinyin” system (漢語拼音 HànYǔ PīnYīn) for pronunciation guides.

While not standard practice, I capitalize the first letter of each syllable that represents a separate Chinese character and clump syllables together that represent individual compound words:

• In the word HànYǔ for example, ‘H’ and ‘Y’ are capitalized because they each begin syllables representing separate Chinese characters: 漢 and 語 respectively.

• There is then a space between HànYǔ and PīnYīn because they represent two separate words: “Mandarin” and “Phonetic Alphabet.”

Word Order

For the most part, Chinese terms will be presented in the following order:

Example: 繁體字 (FánTǐ Zì “traditional Chinese characters”)

Chinese Proper Names

Chinese proper nouns are presented in the following order (with family names written in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS):

Example: Taiwan’s current president is MA Ying-Jeou (馬英九 MǍ YīngJiǔ).