How to Pronunce Haochi

tl;dr: Haochi pronounces “Haochi” as /hoʊ tʃiː/ in IPA and /hō chē/ in AHD representation.

Mandarin

“Haochi” is a combination of Pinyin representation of two Chinese characters’ Mandarin pronunciation, 浩 (hào) 驰 (chí).

Now, a Pinyin “character” can have a number of pronunciations since diacritics are commonly omitted, and each of the character can represent a number of Chinese characters. For “hao”, it can represent about 60 Chinese characters, and about 100 for “chi” (though most are not in common use).

Therefore, my name 浩驰 is just one of over 6,000 possible combinations of “hao” and “chi” in written form. However, most don’t mean anything. I think this is somewhat analogous to German: just because you can combine two words together doesn’t automatically make it a meaningful compound word.

Anway, for example:

  • 好迟 (hǎochí) means very late
  • 好吃 (hăochī) means delicious

Hmm, oishī … Oh wait, hăochī

Hao Chi

“Hao Chi” from Knorr® - a Unilever company. Thanks Unilever, I am hungry already!

Cantonese

“All right, all right, how is Haochi pronounced?”

Oh yes. My mother tongue is a dialect of Cantonese called Taishanese. So the way I pronounce “Haochi” is not in the usual Mandarian pronunciation, but in a somewhat Americanized version of 浩驰 in Taishanese.

Essentially it’s somewhere between /hoʊ tʃiː/ and /həʊ tʃiː/ for the IPA-inclined, and /hō chē/ if you prefer the AHD representation. In other words, it’s the same as “Ho Chi Minh” without the “Minh” part.

· @haochi