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哇，好棒，KoKo你是哪个国家的啊？

Hello^^! I speak limited Cantonese....(I don't really have the characters at all and have to copy and paste the characters.) As for writing it ....I can't write any except 1-10 rofl . There IS one thing that is nagging me though. My dad wrote my full name out.

蕭永德

I know the first and the last character is the surname and the given name.

What I am confused about is the middle character. Is it like a generation name just for the sake of distinguishing between your relatives from your siblings?

Anyways...
永德 is a place in Yunnan rofl

Well, I see both of the last two characters as being your given name. No one would usually just give the first and last characters if someone asked you your name. It's part of your given name. There are many exceptions, but it's quite typical of people from China to have 2 character names, and other Chinese people have 3 character names.

It's more like parents naming their children Andrew and Anthony - they share the 'An' bit, but their names end differently.

You are right in saying that it does serve the purpose of separating people with different parents, although traditionally, I think all the males in one generation shared the middle character, and all the females a different one. Nowadays, things like these are becoming more and more lax.

我不懂什么你说。

我从尤他州（美国）可是我的家是丹麦人和瑞典人。（妈妈是丹麦人和爸爸是瑞典人。）
你是从上海来的吗？

I say your Chinese looks like well^_^
You are right I am from ShangHai.

Yeah, especially since if I pronounced something wrong. She would be [ insert chinese word I pronounced wrong] de [insert same chinese word]. (Ie. 朋友的朋) She didn't really understand much English and we had to listen carefully to what she said in our own native language. At least the EDNET teacher's English was a better but he kept mispronouncing people's names.

Does anyone know a good *free* Chinese word processor for Mac?

I know you can get NJStar to work on Macs with Mac Crossover but I'm broke as a joke right now.

Xiexie in advance!

Hmmm, difficult to answer.

To have a serious grasp of the language, I'd say yes, characters are necessary. Although difficult to learn at first, it's also helpful as it serves as a means of organising all those homophones when you have characters to associate them to. However;

it's not 100% necessary per se. I can't read Chinese, to be honest (as in fluently), but because my parents spoke it to me when I was growing up, I have no troubles understanding and I can speak OK. I have many second-generation Chinese friends who can speak fine but have varying degrees of reading capabilities. However, I don't think any of them don't know any characters at all, and I'm not sure how likely it is you'll be able to learn the language through studying without characters, because my friends and I all learned the language through natural acquisition.

In addition, I'm not sure how convenient it will be for you to find learning resources in only pinyin once you start getting to more advanced stuff. I think this is possible though, because I have heard of expats living in China reading pinyin-only publications because they can speak Chinese but haven't grasped reading/writing it yet.

In conclusion, I think if you're going to try and learn Chinese pinyin-only, you'll have to focus a lot on speaking/listening as your main method of learning. smile