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Agreed, it's chee foo. Chinese has 4 main tones (flat, rising, falling and then rising, and falling) Each of those vowels will have a different tone, and if you want to pronounce it truly correctly, you should find out the tones. He'll definitely understand you if you use the wrong tones in his name though, so don't worry about it.
Posts: 9 | Registered: Aug 2008
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Hmmm, I genuinely wish them the best of luck.
Growing up as a Chinese male over here can be pretty tough at times and that is without the whole adoption angle (or parents of a different race?) in the picture.
There are certainly whole bunches of stuff I wish I could have told myself as a kid.
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Multiple families in my church have adopted several Chinese children. Mostly children with medical issues and unwanted girls. It is a wonderful gift for them.
Posts: 1495 | Registered: Mar 2009
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si fu or shi fu is an honorific given to instructors, among other things, and loosely translates as "master". Calling him "Master Shifu" in the movie was somewhat redundant.
I don't know for sure if the name Qi Fu is related to the honorific, but I think "qi" or "chi" is a different character from the "shi" in "shi fu"
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
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For my daughter's name, me attempting to say it for my Chinese friends led to two different possible names, which meant very different things. Which is why I really need to learn to write the characters. Oh, and to confuse things, my friends speak Mandarin and in laws Cantonese. Which means my pronunciation is absolutely awful.
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quote:Originally posted by Jim-Me: I don't know for sure if the name Qi Fu is related to the honorific, but I think "qi" or "chi" is a different character from the "shi" in "shi fu"
qi, chi, and shi are all pronounced differently, and for any given pronunciation there are several different characters associated with it. As a side note, in Mandarin, the "h" indicates that the consonant is retroflex, which affects the vowel sound as well. Basically, "chi" sounds something like "chur" and "shi" sounds something like "shur."
I have a friend named Joe Lu. When we were in high school we were at a big party out in the woods, which was busted by the police, who ended up giving everyone at the party trespassing tickets for lack of anything else to punish everyone with. The next day the local paper printed everyone's names that were at the party. on the forms we filled out when we received these tickets, the layout was like this:
quote:Name: xxxxxxxxxxxxx DOB: xxxxxxxxx
My friend Joe Lu's name was printed in the paper as Joe Lu Dob. Our best guess was that whoever was putting this all together just couldn't believe someone's whole name consisted of 5 letters. Poor guy's nickname was "dob" for the next two years.
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Strider- My freshman gym teacher asked me the first day of class, "What kind of middle name is Nmn?" I said,"I think that stands for No Middle Name, sir." Apparently the computer system would not register me without a middle name.
Posts: 204 | Registered: Aug 2001
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Figures my internet would be down the weekend we have a thread on Mandarin.
If your romanization is correct Scott then scifibum and Tsinya got it right. If you really care about tones, come back with the characters or the pin yin and I'll let you know how to say em.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Computer systems also dislike people with more than one middle name. I often have to pick one of mine. I vary back and forth, just for kicks.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Teshi: Computer systems also dislike people with more than one middle name. I often have to pick one of mine. I vary back and forth, just for kicks.
I had three middle names when I was growing up, but when I got a new social security card after getting married, the computer system wouldn't allow them to enter that many characters. So I ended up dropping the first one, which I had never liked much anyhow.
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