There is a Chinese riddle: “Europeans have a long one, Chinese have a short one, and Buddhist monks don’t use it at all?”

Correct answer is “name”. It is true, that Chinese names are really short, and western names seem really difficult for them. For people, who don’t know a thing about Chinese language, Chinese name also seems weird and senseless. Even for those who learn Chinese it is not that easy to memorize Chinese name.

In western culture we have a lot of different last names, but only a few first names. On the contrary in China there are about 100 widespread last names and endless variety of names. Parents of a newborn Chinese kid do their best to create unique name with deep meaning. The best thing is that there are no standard names, people are free to use any words they like to make a name for the child. But still there are some popular words like “red”, “beautiful”, “happy” for girls or “strong”, “dragon” for boys.

Some parents get really creative. I had a friend named Huang Hele (sounds like Huang He), another guy was named Chen Bo ( according to his words it means “outer space”), another guy’s name, Gong Jiangguo, can be translated as “someone, who builds the state”.

Sometimes parents use really rare characters in names, so it is better to ask a person to write it down and read aloud.
And the most important thing, in China the first part of the name is the last name, it means in name Hu Jintao, Hu is a last name and Jintao is a first name. Don’t get confused with that!