How to pronounce Tsingtao
There is a delicio
us Chinese beer called 青岛 = qing1 dao3 = "blue-green" + "island".
The way to pronounce this beer is:
1. First word is "ching". It sounds like the "ching" you might say if you were talking about a bunch of cash, like "cha-ching".
2. The second word sounds like the first part of the word dowel. It is just the "dow" part. It's like the first syllable of the word towel, but with a d.
(The second two characters in the picture are just 啤酒 = pi2 jiu3 = "beer" + "alcohol" = beer.)
Even if you can't get the tones right, please call this beer "ching dow". It will sound a lot more awesome than if you said "sing tao" or "tsing tao" or one of the other unpleasant combinations I hear in restaurants.
This beer is actually named after the city in China wher
e it is made. (Side note: the city of 青岛 is beautiful and they have great seafood... it's worth a visit.)
So, if the pinyin is Qing Dao, why is the beer called Tsingtao? Same reason that Beijing is Peking. A lot of words have transliterations that are non-intuitive. I'd like to blame Thomas Wade and Herberg Giles for making up the most confusing romanization system for Chinese of all time, but it's not totally their fault. The Wade-Giles romanization is actually Ch'ing-tao, which isn't terrible.