Q: How do you write Hsin’s name/what is the Chinese character used for Hsin?
A: This question has been asked by various people over the years. Below is a post taken from when this was first answered, on September 10, 2011, at our forum. Read the original post if you’d like.
Original post:
A few people have asked this question recently on AFFN reviews and possibly elsewhere. I can’t recall whether we ever answered this somewhere else on the forum, so for the moment I’m doing the answer here.
Hsin is Xin in Mandarin. The specific character is this:
or this if it’s drawn a little less pretty:
It’s pronounced roughly like if you combined ‘shin’ and ‘sheen’ in English; originally we were told it was more like ‘shin’ and then some native speakers said it’s more like ‘sheen,’ which does seem to be the case when you listen to it. It’s easiest to hear people pronounce it themselves. Listen to these options: youtube, pronouncenames, and hantrainerpro.
[**full disclosure, I updated the above paragraph in October 2017 after hearing it pronounced more like ‘sheen’ than ‘shin’ over the years. When we first wrote ICoS, the internet wasn’t nearly as global in the amount of specific things you could find, like multiple sources recording themselves pronouncing the name Xin. We had to go based on forums and descriptions, and back then I understood it to sound a little more like ‘shin’ than ‘sheen.’ If you look back at old answers to this question, I did say it was more like ‘shin.’ I wanted to note this so there isn’t any confusion.**]
There are several meanings to it and I’m sure even the ones I list will be debated by native speakers. But the ones I saw were:
letter / true / to believe / sign / evidence
That’s in Mandarin, which is his native language.
A side note from my Japanese kanji dictionary: that same character is used in Japanese, where it means trust, believe. It consists of word (second part) and person (first). “A person’s word is something which can be believed and trusted” is the way to remember it.
For those of you who have read Fade chapter 7, that (信) is the pertinent character.
What seems to be Hsin’s middle name is technically his last name in China. That’s Liu, which is this:
So if you were to write his name out directly the way it’s said in English it would be this:
Hsin Liu Vega
信 刘 Vega
Clicking the images will bring you to the direct link of where we found them.
Also note that I asked a number of native speakers for help with identifying the proper Chinese characters for Hsin’s name. Since neither Sonny nor I are fluent in any dialect of Chinese we obviously can’t easily verify things ourselves, but we had several very nice, very helpful people aid us in the identification of options for the characters. Ultimately, Sonny had the last say in what was used. The funny thing is, he chose the same character for Hsin I would have also chosen from the list I provided him.
The Inner Workings of an Ais 