How to Pronounce Chinese Names

Almost every mistake an English speaker makes with a Chinese name comes from the same place: pinyin uses the Latin alphabet, so it looks like it should be read as English, and for about two thirds of the letters that works. The rest were assigned to sounds English does not have, or does not have in that position — and because the letters are familiar, nobody warns you. Cao gets read as cow, Xu as zoo, Qian as kwee-an.

The good news is that this is a finite problem. The letters that break English expectation are a closed set of seven, and Chinese surnames are extraordinarily concentrated — a few dozen of them cover most of the population. Learn the seven letters and the names you actually meet, and you are essentially done. That is what this page is: the seven rules, then 40 surnames said out loud, then the handful that break their own rules.

The seven letters that are not what they look like

The reading beside each example comes from our own dictionary at the moment the page loads, not from anything typed into this article. Tap a character to hear it.

The 40 commonest surnames, said out loud

These are the family names in rank order, and between them they account for the large majority of people in China. This table is about sound only — for what each name means and where it came from, the full ranked hundred is at 100 Most Common Chinese Surnames.

Surnames written with two characters — 欧阳, 司马, 诸葛 — exist but are rare, and they follow exactly the same letter rules. The compound names are listed at the foot of the ranked hundred.

Five surnames that are not read the way the character is

This is the trap a dictionary walks you straight into. A handful of characters have one reading as an ordinary word and a different one as a family name, and the ordinary reading is the one you will be given if you look the character up — here or anywhere else. The everyday column below is pulled live from our own dictionary as this page loads, so you can see the two side by side.

There is no rule behind these — they are historical survivals, and a Chinese reader knows them one by one, from the fact that the character is standing where a surname stands. If you meet a name you cannot place, the safest move is to ask; getting someone's name wrong twice is worse than asking once. More characters with more than one reading, including these, are in Chinese Characters With Multiple Pronunciations.

Then the vowels, which is where names stay wrong

The seven letters above are what people get wrong first. These are what is still wrong afterwards, and each one changes the name rather than merely colouring it — Shí said as shee is a different syllable, not an accent.

If the buzzed i row is the one that surprised you, it is worth reading Distinguishing Similar Chinese Sounds, which takes the same contrasts slowly and with more examples.

Two you have read more often than you have heard

Both are ordinary surnames that happen to be short, which is why they turn up in English headlines — and short names give a reader nothing to correct themselves against.

Which name comes first, and do the tones matter?

The family name comes first. In Zhang Wei, Zhang is the surname and Wei is the given name, and most Chinese speakers writing in English keep that order rather than reversing it — so a three-syllable name is normally one syllable of surname and two of given name. Surnames are almost always a single character; given names are one or two, chosen for their meaning. Understanding Chinese Names covers the structure properly, and Chinese Given Names and Their Meanings covers the half this page does not.

Tones matter less than the consonants, and that is worth saying plainly. A name said with the right sounds and flat, English-ish intonation is usually understood. A name said with English letter values often is not — because x, q, c, z and r do not point at nearby syllables, they point at completely different ones. So fix the consonants first. The tone is still part of the word, it is printed beside every name above, and when you want it properly the Tone Trainer and Tone Pitch Mirror — which draws your own voice against the target — are the two pages for it.

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