Method · NFIP · Live vote n = 0
Native First-Impression Protocol
Five questions a Chinese audience votes on. The panel is about 200,000 followers on Douyin and Xiaohongshu. A sample votes; we do not claim 200,000 ballots. Live n = 0 until the first vote actually runs. We will not fake a score. Until then, the automated first layer is the checker on the sister site — no LLM.
Output is a distribution
Raters do not average into a 94. A name can be “real personal name” for eight people and “foreign spelling” for two. That split is the result — the $199 PDF reports those counts. A single number would hide the disagreement that actually matters.
01
First glance
In one look, what is this?
- A real personal name
- A foreign spelling / transliteration
- A nickname
- Not a name
02
Apparent gender
Without being told, this reads as…
- Masculine
- Feminine
- Unmarked / either
- Cannot tell
03
Apparent era
When would you expect to meet this name?
- Contemporary
- A generation older
- Literary / historical
- Out of time / invented
04
Said fast
When spoken quickly, does it snag?
- Clean
- Funny
- Food / menu
- Slang
- Unlucky or dirty homophone
05
Would you put this on a classmate?
Could you introduce a colleague with this and not explain?
- Yes, without a footnote
- Only with a story
- No
Why five items, not a vibe
Natives clock a name in the time it takes to read a WeChat display. The protocol forces that glance into language: is it a person, a spelling, a pet name, or a caption? Does gender and era land? Does it turn into salad, slang, or bad luck when said fast? Would you put it on a classmate without explaining? Those are the tells teachers and generators skip because they are optimizing for sound.
The automated first layer
Before any rater panel, the Keep / Kill / Fix checker on Chinese Name Check runs a deterministic heuristic: real-surname structure, classic transliterations, middle dots, food collisions, captions, and the feminine transliteration endings 娜 / 莉 / 丽. It does not call a model. Unsure is Fix, never Keep. That is a filter, not a native first impression. On Audience vote ($199), those five items are the ballot for a Chinese audience on Douyin and Xiaohongshu. NFIP is that ballot, not a native-speaker essay pretending to be a poll. The sister site’s method page is chinesenamecheck.com/method.
What n = 0 means
The Chinese audience exists (~200K on Douyin and Xiaohongshu). The first ballot has not run. Empty counts stay empty — we will not fill a bar chart with invented percentages, and we will not claim 200,000 people each vote on one name. When a vote runs, Audience vote ($199) emails the tally as a PDF. Until then, that SKU is waitlisted. Use the checker on a name you already have, or request Native Name if you want the name card files without waiting on a poll.