My name is David. I’ve been living in Taiwan for over five years and just started a blog giving beginner-level video tutorials. I think Laowai Chinese is a terrific reference of all learners of Chinese!

Welcome all to check out my site! I’d love to meet you guys on this site. Regards, David 大卫
http://www.freechineseblog.com

I’m still going to try to make the db thingy, but to be honest I think your idea is sufficient for most people.

My wife tells me that my idea of giving “gender weightings” to each character won’t work - sometimes parents give their children one character names because they sound pretty when combined with the surname.

I found a massive list of Chinese names (500,000+), awaiting permission from the creator to use them.

I’m banking on most of the combinations of name + pronoun to be something like “as for person X, he/she…”, which is obviously not 100% true. So it’s not a foolproof scheme. But I suspect it would be a good first approximation, which you could supplement with component analysis and other cleverness as amake has suggested.

Problems:

Names are often multi-character. This means that there will be a rather large set of names to be added to the database. Some characters could be ignored - 在 for example.

Each character could be given a “gender” weighting, and the result could be the sum of the gender weights. More negative = more likely that it is female, more positive more likely that it is male.

Some characters could be triggers for gender, like 龙 and 花.

Need:

List of all characters used in names.
Values for each character.

In Japanese name genders are pretty obvious, with the first clue being that if it ends with 子 then it’s a girl. Names ending with 男, 夫, 雄, etc. are boys. Of course there are a lot more patterns out there, but I can only think of one gender-neutral name off the top of my head: Mizuki (for which there are many possible kanji combinations).

I am Aussie, but my parents-in-law are Chinese. When I return home and they call out, “Hui lai le,” sometimes I respond, “Mei you. Wo mei hui lai le.”

I can tell they’re just thinking, “Yeah, nice one. Very funny.”

Of course, there is no way that they could understand that I do this just to stay sane sometimes. I do pretty well at fitting into Chinese culture with them, but sometimes you have to express yourself.

One hilarious thing I find is driving in the car with my wife and her parents. Not only do you get statements of the obvious, but echoes of the statements. Say you drive past a person walking a large dog. My father-in-law says, “Da gou.” Then my mother-in-law will say, “Da gou.” I often add my own repetition just to add to the joy: “Da gou.”

OK - Only joking, but I must say the Helloooo from starngers when walking in the streets did have me somewhat fascinated at first, until i got used to it.