"他姓王。"
Translation:His last name is Wang.
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Tā is written different based on the radicals, but pronounced the same way, 他 breaks down into 2 parts, 人 which is "man" (the left part of the character) and 也 which means "also" or "other" - so literally speaking this character means "other male person". Female on the other hand is still Tā but is written as 她 where the first radical comes from 女 meaning "female".
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Yes. I almost put that, but then it occurred to me that it is very useful to remember this phrase specifically if you are telling someone about the fact that the last name is always placed in the first position in Chinese. I answered "last name" also to help me learn all the characters since I find learning this language to be quite a different challenge.
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Xing as last name works in petty much every cases, while 姓氏 Xing Shi on the other hand is bookish, you usually don't use it.
Tip for all: it is helpful to try and identify radicals in characters, it can give a clue of what a character means and maybe even its tone. I find doing this very helpful. e.g. 吃 ( to eat ) has the radical 口 kǒu in it. Kǒu means mouth and the fact that the radical kou is in chi, means that it has to do with a mouth. Another example is 水 (shuǐ)游泳 (youyong) to swim. The radical 水 is included in 游泳, which gives us a clue that the character is related to water, which helps us narrow it down to a particular semantic field. I hope this helped. P.S You may also want to either memorise radicals or check out ChineseFor.Us on youtube, they have a very good immersive teaching process there and i also learnt this tip from them. Thank you !
This question appears to be broken; the correct answer is apparently wrong. https://i.imgur.com/P2EH7JU.jpg
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That is correct, my friend. Though it would be otherwise, in the context of naming a surname, 姓 is a verb, not a noun.
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Sadly you don't, but it'll make it easier when you talk by comparison with English. And that's how it confused Chinese people the other way around. It'll get better when you used to it;)