correct character set for tattooing

[Richard]

hello
i want to get a tattoo and i can't find the piece of paper that had the characters on it
here's the story though
the piece of paper came from a seminar on workplace change management and it used two chinese characters to describe change management in relation to 'crisis'
what was good about was that it implied that crisis was not such a bad thing in the way that the chinese express it
it said that chinese did not have a single character for crisis and in order to express crisis chinese combines the charaters for 'danger' and 'opportunity' thereby implying, in the context of this course, that all change (or crisis) was not such a bad thing
i was quite taken by this analogy and it was also the first thing that i have ever considered having done as a tattoo
hence my question is
what character sets represent this combination of 'danger' & 'opportunity' meaning 'crisis' and are their more than one to choose from
???
many thanks in advance

[lailai]

A good question. In fact President Kennedy once quoted this in one of his speeches. Indeed in Chinese the word "crisis" consists of two characters which respectively means "danger" and "opportunity". Linguistically it is very interesting and has profound implication. However as a Chinese I myself take this as a common place word in conversation. In another word we didn't really realize this profound meaning when we use the word "crisis" in talking with other people.

To answer your question: there is one and only one unique word which is combination of two characters for "crisis". It is "危机" (Be careful that it may not appear correctly if the Chinese system on your computer is not encoded correctly) which is pronounced as "wei ji". However if you only use this sound it may cause some ambiguity; there are a few other words having the same sound as it, such as "microcomputer", "violation of law", etc. It can only be judged from the context what it means. Or it becomes clear only when you write it down. So be careful that when you're using this word, please tell others what you mean is the combination of two words: "danger" ("wei xian") and "opportunity" ("ji hui"). By the way, Chinese people will really think you're knowledgable if you know the origin of this word.

[Access to Chinese]

www.lechinois.com/accesstochinese.html

wei1 ji1

危机

[gemma]

can you give me my name as written in chinese, i hope you can oblige, thank you.

[martin]

危機