Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 December 25

Je ne parle pas un word de Chinese, so your aide et des conseils, comme toujours, très appreciated. Relevant article is Fang Binxing. 謝謝--Shirt58 (talk) 14:16, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

:There are two easy ways to find out the pinyin of any Chinese character, even without parlaying any Chinois. One is to go to http://translate.google.com/, enter the phrase, say you want it translated from Chinese into Chinese, and then click "Read phonetically". Doing this gets you "Fāng bīn xìng". The other is to look each character up individually at Wiktionary, and look under the "Mandarin" section: wikt:方#Mandarin wikt:滨#Mandarin wikt:兴#Mandarin. Doing this gets you "fāng, fēng, páng, wǎng", "bīn", "xīng, xìng". Since the article is already called "Fang Binxing", we can rule out the last three options for 方 and go with Fāng for the surname and either Bīnxīng or Bīnxìng for the given name. Google Translate suggests the latter, but I don't really trust a machine translator to know which tone is correct in this context. Maybe we'll have to rely on a human being to tell us the tone of the third character. —Angr (talk) 22:22, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

::Google translate's pinyin feature is useful, but admittedly can be a little iffy at times (see related discussion at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Language/2010 October 28#Chinese characters to pinyin?. The pronunciation give in [http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTI1NzY4NjI0.html this news report] (the video is on Youku which means it's probably gonna take forever to open if you're outside of China, but she says his name in the first few seconds) is Fāng Bīnxīng. rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:06, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

:::どうも [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcCS8AK6csg ありがとう], —Angr and Rjanag, and thanks for the links - when I grow up, I may well be able to add pinyin all by myself!--Shirt58 (talk) 15:27, 26 December 2010 (UTC)