Interesting China reading for March 8th, 2010.

How things have changed in a few short months since I wrote an article commenting on my lack of understanding of the Twitter phenomenon. I now use it daily, and even much more so than Adium or Skype for much of my chattering with Beijing locals (you should absolutely be following me, @marcwan). In some ways, writing little 140 character messages in twitter space is like farting in the wind – who knows who’s going to notice. But there is one surprising side-effect of these short messages that I’ve decided I really enjoy: It encourages better writing.

Of course, many people will smply strt wrtng lke ths 2 get thngs 2 fit, but for those people who use Twitter for more professional goals, and attempt to maintain a (reasonably) polished appearance there, the 140 character limit forces you to really think about what you’re going to say and how you want to say it.

As somebody who all too often uses words like actually, really, absolutely, reasonably, and softens many sentences to make them avoid seeming too concrete or prescriptive, Twitter has really forced me to cut these out and start writing more succinctly. This is a good thing™.

(Interesting side note: you can type a lot more Chinese in 140 characters you can Western languages. Those characters pack a lot of meaning, and you can basicaly write a paragraph or two per Tweet. Contrast that with the struggle to fit a single sentence in the same space).

So, here’s to hoping my blog posts become increasingly less long-winded. All thanks to Twitter. Who’da thunk it?

A few hundred times a day, I run across a Chinese character that I’ve never seen before. Or – quite frequently – one that I’ve seen and looked up a dozen times, but for which I can never remember the meaning. I make a point of getting off my butt once or twice a day to look it up again. On rare occasions, I will be rewarded with a character whose meaning is: itself.

My favourite two examples so far are:

• 崂 (láo)
• 兖 (yǎn)

The first is typically defined as “The 崂 in 崂山 (láoshān)”. 崂山 is a national park / nature area near the city of Qingdao (青岛) in Shandong (山东) province. The 崂 character really has no other use apart from the occasional transliteration of a foreign sound

Similarly, 兖 refers to the Yan River and the major city which lies on it, Yanzhou (兖洲 – yǎnzhōu). That’s it.

You know you’ve made it big in China when you get your own character (汉字 – hànzì) that a zillion Chinese kids have to study and memorise.

On Friday night I was at Nánlúogǔxiàng (南锣鼓巷), when the following conversation took place -

The scene: Me, standing around idly playing a game on my iPhone waiting for some friends to finish browsing in the jewelry store, watching the people strolling past.

Chinese guy (very drunk): Ha-looooooooo!
Me (looking up): ?
Chinese guy (getting closer): Ha-loooooooooo!
Me:  Ha-looo?
Chinese guy (still drunk):  Do... you ... uh ... speak ... Chi-neese?
Me:  Yes.
Chinese guy (pointing): 啊太好啦！麻烦你告诉我那边是南边还是北边？
Me: 南边。那边是北边。
Chinese guy: 哈哈哈！我知道了，必须告诉我的女朋友！
Me (smiling)
Chinese guy: Thaaaaannnnk .... you!
(runs off)

Never a dull moment in this city.

One of my favourite restaurants here in Beijing is a place by the name of 黄河水 (huánghéshǔi), or Water of the Yellow River. It’s a Sha’anxi Province (through which the yellow river flows) restaurant, has fantastic noodles, and caters to the locals, which means crazy crowds and lines, simple menus, and low prices.

Most chinese restaurants periodically update their menus and decor with new prices and signs. 黄河水 is no exception, and recently redid their interior. But instead of calling themselves a pulled noodle (扯面) restaurant now, they pulled out the most crazy simplified character any of us have ever seen and started calling themselves a biāngbiāng noodle place. Biāngbiāng is the sound noodles supposedly make when you stretch or pull them, sort of like boing or twang in English.

The character they found for biāng is pictured above. At 42 strokes, it’s hands down the hardest character that I or a Chinese teacher friend of mine have seen so far. None of the dictionaries, computers, or books I have looked at so far have it either. In fact, it’s the only instance of the sound biang I’ve ever seen in Chinese (If you look at all the possible vowel/glide and consonant combinations available in Chinese, a reasonable percentage of them never occur), and is probably made up based on some dialect.

Even nuttier would be that the traditional version, without the simplified radicals, would have at least 10 more strokes, putting it well over 50 !!!

China is currently going through a huge cultural debate as to whether the Simplified character movement of the 50s was a mistake and as to whether they should go back to the traditional characters. As somebody who has learned all of his Chinese in the former, and only had exposure to the latter in the Japanese versions, I will just mention that I’m insanely glad I learned the Simplified ones ….

While I’m not particularly keen on spending much time posting or talking about Chinglish and bad slogans and signs here in China – there are already plenty of sites on the Internet that do this much better than I – on a recent walk home from having some business cards made, I ran into a number of particularly comical signs, all in the span of a few hundred metres, and all quite chuckle-worthy.

The day started off somewhat surreally as I walked past a local Chinese restaurant, only to have the restaurant name supplemented by “MYSQL”. Buy one bowl of noodles, get an ACID-compliant transactional engine for free?

It turns out that the name of the restaurant is 明月三千里, or míng yuè sān qiān lǐ. Hence, the MYSQL. Still, good fun:

Next, I walked past a massage parlour that advertised “Cupping and scrape measles”. Cupping, or bōguàn (拨罐), is a reasonably common treatment here in China, which provides topical relief on the skin for various ailments. Scraping, or gūashā (刮痧), is another frequently used treatment for heatstroke and other discomforts involving scraping the back of the neck or upper back. Unfortunately, there is no direct translation like cupping, so when you take the two characters separately, the first gives you scraping, the second gives you “acute ailment”, such as measles or some other virus. Hence, some great sign fun.

Not that it’s a hugely common problem here in China, but I guess the maintainers of this little garden next to a scrool, across the road from the parlour, wanted to make sure that nobody would use their cute little park as a public toilet (there is actually a public toilet about 20m away). Hence this sign asking exactly that:

With the huge fire of the Mandarin Hotel building next to the new CCTV complex on the east Third Ring Road due to unauthorised fireworks, construction sites all around the city are now being extra careful to point out that fireworks are illegal in the city now that Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) is over. This one reminds readers that fireworks are illegal inside the 5th ring road:

And finally, I went to meet a friend for some lunch, and walked past a DVD store with this gem in the window:

Evidence suggests they meant to use the word “painting”, which would also be incorrect. The sign asks you not to write any graffiti on their windows. This is in Sanlitun, a big party area on Friday and Saturday evenings, with huge crowds of drunken foreign kids from 10pm until late.

A few years ago, I had a Palm Treo, which was a pretty cool device – for 2004. The two big problems were its weight – dropping it would immediately break the glass, something I discovered four times in one calendar year – and its lack of UTF-8 support, which made entering accents and weird (read: Asian) characters impossible.

Fast-forward a few years to the iPhone, and finally you have a handset that is both 100% UTF-8 and actually shipping with a worldwide font so you can view emails and pages in Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, and even enter contacts with names in those languages.

But there was a bug: Contacts entered in Chinese characters would not be sorted correctly – they were just lumped at the bottom and you just knew to tap “Z” when you wanted to text or email your Chinese colleague or friend.

The iPhone 2.2 firmware finally fixes this. They now sort names correctly, with Chinese names sorted by pinyin. (Oddly enough, Japanese names are still not sorted by romaji.) In fact, they’ve supplemented the UI for contact names so that you can enter (in Latin characters) how the name is pronounced and how it should be sorted.

An already cool device keeps getting cooler.