Writing.skserver.org

I stumbled upon an interesting article today about writing a name in chinese characters. There is no such thing as a chinese alphabet, so how can your name be written in chinese? It works this way: someone who knows Chinese will pick up the characters which sounds like your name, or closest to it. As the article explains:

“Now how does this work in reality? As you may imagine, the Chinese read the news of the world in Chinese and when, say, Bill Gates visits China, they write his name in Chinese. They use two words which sound like “gai” and “ci” (pronounced together as “gaitsu”) for his surname and “bi” and “er” (pronounced together as “beer”) for his first name. So his name in Chinese is Bier Gaici (beer gaitsu). All of these 4 characters originally have a meaning but it becomes irrelevant as soon as they are used for a foreign name.”