He? Heh? Hëh? ? The story of my Chinese last name.

[renzhe]

I think Hé with a tone is probably your best bet.

I personally would go with this one. The tone marker looks like a stress (which is common enough in European names) and people will notice it's a foreign name which likely requires special pronunciation.

[yanggers]

That international alphabet output looks cool. I guess those letters don't have their own names like "kai"/"eks" or "lowercase delta" because that would be going away from phonemes again. "Huh" or "Huhh" would be strangely fitting in a way because the last name's character 何 is a question word! I actually am thinking ahead to my distant-future children to be fashioning not too goofy of a last name. Also there is the continuity issue with my parents. All in all I'm gonna change my last name to "Hé".

Now I'm gonna have fun with the first and middle names!

[Yang Rui]

I know someone (a Mandarin speaker from northern China) with the surname 何 who ended up spelling it Ho in the US. The advantage of this is that although her name is now always pronounced wrongly, other people know how to pronounce it and therefore feel more at ease with it. You could argue that it's not up to you to make people feel at ease when pronouncing your name and if they get embarrassed it's their problem, but i think she just found that having an easily pronounceable name smoothed the way in a lot of cases.

I think Hé is ok too, but be prepared for everyone to pronounce it "hay"

Edited January 6, 2009 at 06:03 AM by Yang Rui
for clarification

[gato]

I know someone (a Mandarin speaker from northern China) with the surname 何 who ended up spelling it Ho in the US. The advantage of this is that although her name is now always pronounced wrongly, other people know how to pronounce it and therefore feel more at ease with it.

The downside is that it's a slang for wh***.

All in all I'm gonna change my last name to "Hé".

If you are in the U.S., you are going to get a lot of people who don't know what to do with the accent. Why not "Hur" or "Hurr"?

[ABCinChina]

I have personally seen Chinese people in the US get ripped on for having "Ho" as a last name. It sounds just like "hoe" and they are going to hate growing up with that surname.

[heifeng]

If your set on NOT using Pinyin, maybe just

Heh

or

Hhe (just enough to confuse the english speakers and then you can straighten them out each time and tell them it's He2...instead of them automatically reading 'heeee'. )