Thursday, July 2, 2009

English names of Chinese People can throw you for a loop.

Apropos this article, here is a list of some English names I have seen students give themselves:   Eleven, Angel, Polo, Range (as in Range Rover), Windy, Apple, Hannah, Queenie, Gemma, Kwin, Walker, Alien, Carry, and Ruin.

2 comments:

Dave in Macau said...

I live in Macau and we have many of the same wacky names here, not to mention:
Ferrari
Perrier
Milk
Toby (a girl)
Don (a girl)
Heidi (a boy)

And that is just off the top of my head..

wuxi andis said...

The list I gave was off the top of my head too.

I remember being thrown by a man calling himself Lotus. I first thought of the flower. But he then reminded me of the sportscar. Like your man Ferrari. (I assume he was a man).

I remember we had to tell a girl to change her name. She had written Shitty on her name tag. It was an approximation of her chinese name.

Another student would not change his name from Sot after my repeatingly telling him that it meant drunkard in English. He was an engineer and said "Sot" had an industrial application.

Finally, the most wacky name, in my experience, came from a student named Wang whose favorite basketball player was Magic Johnson. Guess what he called himself?

Thanks for taking the time to make a comment.