Name in Chinese

What these have in common

None of them will teach you Chinese, and that is the point of gathering them here. They are the parts of Chinese culture that can be met without studying it: a name written in an unfamiliar script, a red seal, a set of good wishes on a card, a board game, a cycle of twelve animals that everyone in China knows their place in.

The name tools are the ones most people arrive for, and they come in two kinds that are easy to confuse. Transliteration writes your own name in another script, by sound, so that it stays recognisably yours: Chinese, but also Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hindi, Arabic and Russian. A real Chinese name is something else entirely, a family name plus a given name chosen for meaning, the kind a teacher gives a foreign student on the first day.

The games are worth more than they look. Xiangqi, go, mahjong and luzhanqi are not curiosities in China, they are what people play, in parks and on phones, and each one has rules explained here in full rather than assumed. Learning one of them is a faster route into a conversation than most vocabulary lists.

The astrology and almanac tools are here as cultural information. The twelve animals and the sixty-year cycle they belong to run through the language, the festivals and the calendar quite apart from what anyone believes about them, and knowing your animal is knowledge everyone in China assumes you have.