Photo by @biesnecker:
The original character is, of course, 多 (“more”).
(Specifically, “50% more more.”)…
18
Apr
2013
2013
Reactivation (character art)
I’m planning a trip to the Shanghai Power Station of Art, and I couldn’t help but notice (and appreciate the cover design for a book called Reactivation. Can you read what it says on the cover?
(You’ll need at least an Intermediate level of Chinese to know the words, but even a high elementary-level student should have learned most of the characters, in theory.)
OK, to prevent anyone from getting too frustrated, here’s the Chinese:
重新发电
I’m looking …
01
Mar
2013
2013
Chinese Type: Playing with Perspective
I just discovered this really cool “perspective effect” on Behance:
[Note: This is an animated GIF, so if you're not seeing animation, you're not seeing the effect.]
This is sort of similar to the Chinese/English ambigrams I’ve written about before.…
26
Feb
2013
2013
Creating Characters by SVG
A new project called SVG Hanzi (SVG 漢字/SVG 汉子) allows anyone to piece together an image of a character by specifying its structure and component parts. Very cool!
From the site:
SVG Hanzi is a web service that can be used to obtain a picture of any Chinese character in SVG format.
It is only necessary to visit a link that looks like http://svghanzi.appspot.com/[Character Code].
Character Code here should consist of an Ideographic Description Character ⿰, ⿱, ⿲,
…
23
Jan
2013
2013
Unspeakable Travel Possibilities
ChinesePod Jenny was telling me that she read about a story told by the CEO of C-trip (携程). C-trip was trying to make a Weibo post about “independent travel” (i.e. not travel with a tour group). In China, this kind of travel is called 自由行. 自由 means “free” (as in freedom), and 行 is an abbreviation of 旅行, which means “travel.”
Well the word for “freedom” tripped the censorship filter, and the post was rejected.
So …
03
Dec
2012
2012
No Sugar, No t
“No sugar” or “sugar-free” in Chinese is 无糖. The character 无, in its simplified form (not 無), is not particularly difficult to write. It’s barely more complex than “#.” The character for “sugar,” however, is a different story: 糖. Kind of complex.
So if you’re working in a coffee shop and have to quickly mark coffee cups with a label that means “no sugar,” what are you going to use? Are you going to bother to …
18
Oct
2012
2012
Creative Character Signage
Long-time readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of creativity centered on characters. I recently discovered these signs browsing photos on WeChat. (I’ll post the Chinese characters below the photos if you want to give yourself the challenge of reading them on your own.)
The characters on the sign above are: 时光机 (“time machine”).
The characters on the two signs above are: 锅炉房 (“boiler room”).…
25
Sep
2012
2012
iOS6 has your iPhone speaking Chinese
I got a great tip from my friend Will Stevenson yesterday. Apparently iOS6 not only added text-to-speech support for new languages, but also enabled the ability to recognize and read out Chinese, even when the phone is in English language mode, and even when the text is a mix of Chinese and English.
What it is
Here’s an example of “Speak” enabled for a Chinese spam text:
Here’s an example of “Speak” for a note which includes both …
12
Sep
2012
2012
A Visual Case for Stroke Order
Inevitably, students of Chinese characters will ask, at some point, “why do we have to learn stroke order? What difference does it make?“
It’s a good question. This is the answer:
(The message reads 好无聊. “So bored.”)
This is what Chinese characters start to look like as the strokes flow together. And it’s not just about calligraphy and an appreciation of ancient culture; I discovered the image above through Tencent’s WeChat (the iPhone app).…
07
Aug
2012
2012
Better Chinese, Worse iPad Skills
I’ve heard some good things about a program for school kids called Better Chinese. Like many modern Chinese learning programs, Better Chinese is also on the iPad learning bandwagon. This screenshot from the website features the app:
Yikes! How’d they get a kid from the late 70′s to pose with that iPad, and why didn’t they tell him not to use a pen with that touchscreen?
I’m sure we’ll all figure out how to learn Chinese using these touchscreen …
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