Naming the baby?

My wife was pretty relaxed about naming for child #1, a daughter, for either the Chinese or English name. And for the new baby coming, I'd actually like her to start putting more thought into it. Only a month to go. I really want to go with an Irish name. But for many of the really Irish names (non-anglicized spelling) I have hard enough time pronouncing the name, so can't really expect my wife or the Chinese people around to her to get it right. E.g. for our daughter, I really liked Saoirse, but I just knew that no one here in Shenzhen was ever going to get it right and pronounce it Seer-sha..
 
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My wife was pretty relaxed about naming for child #1, a daughter, for either the Chinese or English name. And for the new baby coming, I'd actually like her to start putting more thought into it. Only a month to go. I really want to go with an Irish name. But for many of the really Irish names (non-anglicized) I have hard enough time pronouncing the name from the spelling, so can't really expect my wife or the Chinese people around to her to get it right. E.g. for our daughter, I really liked Saoirse, but I just knew that no one here in Shenzhen was ever going to get it right and pronounce it Seer-sha.
 
Hello.

What we did was as below.

If baby is boy:
--> My husband chose the first name and I will give a middle name.

If baby is girl:
--> I chose the first name and my husband gives a middle name.

Our baby happened to be a boy so my husband (British) gave a English first name and I (Japanese) gave a Japanese middle name to our son. We are quite happy with this arrangement.

But one thing both of us agreed before we named our baby is, if one of us HATE or DISLIKE the name the partner chose, we will not use that one. The both of us have to at least "like" the name. You know, you never want to give a name you HATE or DISLIKE to your own baby. So this was very important to us.

Good luck!

Sucellia
 
By the way, when we (both my husband and I) chose the name, we explained to each other why we chose that one. It was important for us because my husband does not speak any Japanese so he needs to know the reason and meaning of the name (and vice versa for me, too). After we explained the reasons and meanings to each other, we were very happy with the name we chose.

Each Japanese text (Kanji - Chinese character) has a different meaning and quite often has more than one meanings so it was not easy to chose the Kanji with great sound and meaning at the same time! But both my husband and I love the name we gave it to our son now.
 
About including the romanization of the Chinese name with the English name... I was not so keen on that either, as I feel that an English name is an English name and one can still have the Chinese name (in Chinese characters) --more true to form... but my husband pointed out that there will be LOTS of people with the same name as our children if we don't do that (this is if you choose more common English names and your surname is also a common one).

True enough, I did a search online for "Name / Surname" of our children and there came out tons and that finally convinced me to include the "chinese" name in the English name on the birth cert. My cousin who has a very common name/surname was stopped at the Manila airport on his way out, because somebody else with the same name as his was on the Wanted list! Didn't want to have any hassle like that for our kids.
 
At least my surname isn't Lee, Chan or Wong (I think those are the three most common Chinese surnames - at least in Cantonese anyway)!! And we do plan on having an English middle name as well as an English first name...

We asked my FIL to think about a Chinese name - hopefully he comes up with something good!! We have NOOOO idea how to choose Chinese names...
 
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