I like the building numbers at 映巷创意工场:
If you don’t recognize the numbers, check my number character variants post. They are: 贰 (2), 叁 (3), 肆 (4).
Building #4 is where Xindanwei is. This Friday at 4pm I’m giving a talk there called Language Power Struggles in Shanghai. Feel free to stop in! I’ll post notes on it here later.…
Humans are such creatures of habit. Take, for example, the matter of salary. In the States it’s always a yearly figure. I have a good idea of how an American can live in $50k a year, or $75k a year, or $100k a year, etc. Likewise, salaries in China are always given per month. I have a good idea what it means to live in China on RMB 1k per month, RMB 5k per month, RMB 10k per month, etc. …
I recently stumbled across Copperpoint’s awesome reference to the Chinese “hand gestures” for numbers 6 through 10 (via Meg). I felt the method really needed a visual aid, so I took the liberty of creating one (complete with an awesome Shanghai background). I also realized that if Copperpoint’s message was to be taken from just funny to useful, it needed some more mnemonics connecting the gestures with the numbers and/or the Chinese words for them. So I took …
A little while back I recommended that Mark of the blog Doubting to shuō make an online number conversion tool similar to his Pinyin Tone Tool and Cantonese Tone Tool. Well, Mark has done it. These are the kinds of conversions it can do:
| Input | Output |
| 五千八百 | 5800 |
| 兩百五十 | 250 |
| 三百萬 | 3000000 |
| 三百万 | 3000000 |
| 7十 | 70 |
| 九億 | 900000000 |
| 九亿 | 900000000 |
| 6.25亿 | 625000000 |
| 1500万 | 15000000 |
| 五億三千九百二十萬四千四百四十一 | 539204441 |
| 壹仟叄佰柒拾捌 | 1378 |
Note that the Chinese Number Tool handles simplified, traditional, and …
If you’ve studied Chinese characters, you know that each number has its own Chinese character. As a joke, many Chinese-illiterate foreigners boast that they know three Chinese characters: 一 二 三 (1, 2, 3). After 3, though, the characters start getting a little harder to remember.
Or do they? Recently I discovered this little-known character: 亖. It means 4. I didn’t find a similar one for 5, though.
Still, there’s a lot more to Chinese number characters below the …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
All Posts