Reading Chinese Names: Female Names
One thing I have noticed recently is that many Chinese learners are not well-equipped to read Chinese names. This is because textbooks usually have names like 王朋 and 张天明 that use basic characters learners already know. But real Chinese names often contain characters that are not taught in classes/textbooks.
I compiled a corpus of over 515 characters found in around 1000 female given names. These names came from members of idol groups (like SNH48 and AKB48-SH) and participants on idol survival shows (like Produce 101 China). I did my best to remove duplicate individuals (like the AKB48 members who participated in CZ101) and not include stage names that are not authentic Chinese names (like 欧若拉). A lot of performers go by stage names that sound authentic or have changed their legal name–I included these. I separated the names into individual characters and then counted how many times each character occurred in the corpus as a whole. Note that these data are not necessarily representative of the overall populations of China and Taiwan. However, I think this info is still valuable.
Below I have the top 75 characters, aka those that were found at least 7 times. I’ve included all the counts for those who may be interested.
佳 jiā - beautiful, fine, good / 35
怡 yí - harmony, pleased / 31
嘉 jiā - excellent, auspicious, to praise, to commend / 24
诗 shī - poem, poetry, verse / 18
梦 mèng - dream, to dream / 17
羽 yǔ - feather, 5th note in pentatonic scale / 17
倩 qiàn - pretty, winsome / 16
小 xiǎo - small, tiny, few, young / 16
思 sī - to think, to consider / 15
文 wén - language, culture, writing, formal, literary, gentle / 15
美 měi - beautiful, very satisfactory, good, to beautify, to be pleased with oneself / 14
依 yī - to depend on, to comply with or listen to sb, according to, in the light of / 13
天 tiān - day, sky, heaven / 13
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