why do they call shin chan sinosuke or something like that and what does it mean?

Answer 1

He's called "Shinnosuke" sometimes, which is his full first name. "Shinnosuke" is a fairly common Japanese first name. In the Japanese manga, his name is consistently written in hiragana, a phonetic alphabet ("しんのすけ" = "shi - n - no - su - ke"). I've not seen the kanji for it, as far as I can recall.

There are a ton of different ways to write "Shinnosuke" in kanji; my dictionary software lists more than 80 writings of that name. Japanese doesn't have very many different syllables. As a result, for any given syllable there are usually several kanji which have that pronunciation. For example, "Shin" in "Shinnosuke" can be written: 伸 (stretch), 信 (fidelity), 心 (heart), 慎 (prudence), 新 (new), 晋 (advance), 真 (truth), 紳 (gentleman), 親 (familiarity), 進 (progress), 愼 (chastity), 眞 (reality), 臻 (gather), and a couple of other ways. In various combinations with different ways to write "no" and "suke," you end up with 80+ writings. (And that's only the ways it can be written in "Shinnosuke." There are almost 100 kanji that can be pronounced "shin" in other contexts.)

If you want to know the actual meaning of Shinchan's name, you'd have to know which kanji are used to write it out. Unfortunately, the phonetic spelling doesn't uniquely identify that, but that's common in Japanese (a great language if you're into puns). One particular kanji spelling that I've seen on more than one Japanese web site for Shinchan's first name is "新之助". I don't know whether that's official, but... the first character means "new", the second means "of", and the third "assist." Still, there's no deeper meaning there -- it's just his name.

"Shin" is a shortened version of his name, just the first character. That's roughly equivalent to calling someone named Christopher "Chris" in English. And "-chan" is a suffix indicating endearment, more or less.

Upshot: "Shinnosuke" is his full first name, Shin-chan is an abbreviated version.