This is my name in China 倪毕克. Why the hell do I have a Chinese name, I hear my western imperialist friends asking. Lets just say it makes life easy, Kirk Nesbitt is a bit of a mouthful, Chinese forms have about 1/2 a poofteenth of space to write your name, it’s impossible to book tables at restaurants under Kirk Nesbitt and everyone here seems to get a kick out of it.
Thankfully Kirk has a direct Chinese phonetic translation 柯克, but unfortunately it is also a brand of cough medicine, whilst I find this mildly amusing, most of my Chinese friends find it bloody hilarious. It’s not a good look in business meetings when your name sparks off furtive and rapid Chinese discussion, followed by laughter with the explanation “you are cough medicine”.
It’s pronounced Knee Be Ker (ker as in kerb, without the b).
Oh and for the geeks in the audience, I finally worked out how to get UTF-8 encoding working in WordPress 
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So if you pronounce it out loud does it sound like “Knee Beaker”.
Oh – and if one part means “cough medicine” (a cure for those lung oysters perhaps?) what does the other part mean?
I suppose you “might” pronounce it that way, so long as you put a pause between the two syllables of Beaker.
Ni means nothing, it’s one of the common 100 Chinese surnames. In fact China is running out of surnames, as it’s popular to pick one from the top 100.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surnames