[quote=“tigerman”][quote=“Toe Save”]Damn! Can’t paste the characters…Ax…give mine a whirl…I have chosen this for myself:
Goo Wu Wei
Goo as in Shan Goo or Mountain valley…my family name means valley.
Wu Wei from the Lao Tze saying, unprintable in Pinyin but translation is Do Nothing But Do…
So my Chinese name is The Valley of Do Nothing[/quote]
Yes, the actual idea is expressed as "
I’ve done further analysis of my own name 
and after picture!googling for a while here’s what I got for my own entertainment.
My Chinese name is 高泰樂 (Kao Tai Le). It sounds similar to my real name. My first name, ‘tai4 le4’ was given to me by my Chinese professor in the States and it means peaceful happiness. My last name Kao (gao1) means tall or great and the idea came from how one of my students used to pronounce my last name in English. I think my whole name means ‘great peaceful happiness’, but I’m not too sure.
[quote=“kimichen”]
Oops! It’s a heavy duty. If you like I can try, give me your English name.
Haha, my Chinese professor in college was Professor Kubler (yeah, I know, a German guy), and his Chinese name is
Well my Chinese name really obscure The First Character is
Mine is
The wives is right… Matrilineal must have a good reason, you might have a lot of father
but only one mother bears you
ax
[quote=“Jive Turkey”]I have a question for all the foreign dads whose wives are Taiwanese. What family name did you give your children, your wife’s or yours? Does Taiwan have a policy about that? In HK, you can do what you want. When we got married, I thought we would just give the kids my wife’s family name, which of course her dad wouldn’t mind. However, as I’ve become more and more established here and a lot of people only know me by my Chinese name, I sometimes think the kids should have my name. I’ve mentioned this to a few mixed couples (almost all foreign guy and Chinese woman), and the Chinese halves always say: “but your name doesn’t mean anything. You’re not Chinese; you just took the name as a convenience for communication.” The foreign husbands, most of whom don’t speak much Chinese anyway, just nod in agreement with the wives. My wife doesn’t really have an opinion about it. Does anyone have any experiences to share about this?[/quote]The policy is that the children are forced to take the father’s massacred chinese name, even if it isn’t the father’s real family name, or if it sounds stupid given to a Taiwanese person.
We’re still waiting for Taiwan to join the 20th Century, never mind the 21st.
forumosa.com/3/viewtopic.php?p=118511
forumosa.com/3/viewtopic.php?t=7695
If you want to discuss this furthur, please go to one of those threads and keep this one on topic.
[quote=“Grasshopper”]Well my Chinese name really obscure The First Character is
before i got married, my wife and i decided that my randomly selected by an ex chinese teacher name, wasn’t going to cut it, and since the above mentioned archaic and laughable Taiwanese law, will force our future children to use my name, we decided i had better follow the commonly accpeted route to getting a real chinese name, ie. going to the almighty name diviner priest guy at the hillside temple… he was busy, so we went to a slightly less almighty guy a few blocks from my house, gave him all of my info, date, place, time of birth… he looked at my hands, and he did all the usual posturing these quasi mystics do to pull the wool over the eyes of the ‘devoute’, and after 2 days went back to sit through pages of numbers and charts and good alignments and auspicious inferences, and eventually he pronounced the the absolute must have name for me was in fact
It’s not often I literally Laugh Out Loud while using the computer, but this was one of the times! Superb. Can it really be translated as ‘shellfish sack’ or is that just a typical example?
I believe that the common Chinese transliteration of my name means ‘bridge’. I hope that doesn’t tempt people to walk all over me.
Fed up of having an unnatural-sounding Chinese transliterated name, I asked my learned friend to help me choose a better one. He chose it mainly on the basis of number of strokes, so the resultant name has a lucky number - I think this is another common method.
By the way, where did you get your online name? Is it some kind of device from Star Trek?
Yes, it actually could be translated as that,
[quote=“plasmatron”]
[quote=“wix”]