Help needed for new tattoo

[makig99]

Hi,

 

There are three chineese letters that mean lucky; fortunate; survivor. Can anyone tell me what those are?

 

Regards,

Ali

[Demonic_Duck]

"Lucky" and "fortunate" are pretty much 100% synonymous in English. Not sure what you think the difference between the two is.

 

There is no single Chinese letter character that means "survivor".

[makig99]

幸存者 What does this mean. I know the first letter means lucky but what about the 3 words?

[Lu]

It means 'survivor', as in someone who survived a disaster.

 

Many languages (English, Dutch, Russian, Kinyarwanda) are written with letters, which are used to form words. Chinese is not written with letters, but with characters. Every character has meaning on its own, but in most cases, two or more characters are combined to form words. For example, 国 'country' and 家 'home' are combined to form 国家 'country', and 中 'middle' and 国 'country' are combined to form 中国 'China'.

 

In case of 幸存者, the characters separately mean 'lucky' 'saved, preserved' and '[particle to indicate person doing this]'. But you don't read the characters separately, you read them as one word, 'survivor'.

 

That said, I don't think this is a very good idea for a tattoo. I suggest you pick a symbol or picture that is meaningful for you (perhaps an image that symbolises the thing you survived?), instead of something in a language you don't understand.