尼斯(ní sī) - Nice (city on the French Riviera) in Mandarin

尼斯 (ní sī) is the Chinese name for Nice, the city on the French Mediterranean coast. Like most European place names in Chinese it is a sound-alike: the characters were chosen to fit the syllables, not to describe the place.

尼 and 斯 are workhorse transliteration characters and turn up all over the atlas: 威尼斯 (Venice), 尼日利亚 (Nigeria), 俄罗斯 (Russia). Seeing them together in an unfamiliar word is a decent signal that you are looking at a foreign name rather than a Chinese compound.

The trap is trying to read the meaning. Learners who know 尼 from 尼姑 (Buddhist nun) go hunting for a religious sense that is not there. Treat a transliterated name as one indivisible label, and note that Chinese needs no article: it is 去尼斯, never 去那个尼斯.