How to pronounce my name?

Pronounced approximately as CHEN Tsing-yoo, with a slight pause between the syllables.

My full name consists of three Chinese characters:

• My family name is 陈 (Chén) — usually the easiest part, aside from its rising tone.
• My given name is 庆雨 (Qìng Yǔ):
  • Qing rhymes with “sing” and carries a falling tone. The initial consonant /tɕʰ/ is notoriously tricky and has no exact equivalent in most Indo-European languages, though /tʃ/ (in “cheese”) and /ts/ (in “tsunami”) offer close approximations.
  • Yu sounds like “you” but with rounded lips — similar to the French u or German ü.

Please do insert a glottal stop between the two syllables — otherwise gyu would sound like I’m a Japanese cow (as in wagyu).

I happen to be a linguistics enthusiast (as you might have guessed). So if you read IPA, here you go: /ʈʂʰən³⁵ tɕʰiŋ⁵¹ y²¹⁴/.

Anything interesting about my name?

Around 80 million people on the planet share the same family name 陈 with me. It is the fifth-most common family name in mainland China, and it ranks the first in places including Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.

The romanization of 陈 varies across Chinese dialects: I use the Mandarin version, Chen, while Chan (Cantonese) and Tan (Hokkien) are also very common. Variants of the name also appear in non-Chinese contexts — such as Trần in Vietnamese and Jin or Chin (진) in Korean.

My given name, 庆雨 (Qìng Yǔ), literally means “to celebrate the rain.” And no, I wasn’t born on a rainy day, in case you’re wondering. It was chosen by my grandfather, who believed that it would bring me luck — since I was born in the year of the dragon (loong), a mythical creature associated with water and weather.