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Chinese Number Websites

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Re: Chinese Number Websites

#61

Post by ezl »

danoprey wrote: post #37
ezl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

chinese speakers like yao often because it sounds LESS like other numbers and is harder to miss. yao1 (1) and liu4 (6) should be pretty distinct. but if the way you pronounce them is similar for whatever reason, you can always use yi and chinese listeners won't flinch. in fact, taiwanese americans will be confused by yao, but zero people will be confused by yi so it's arguably better to use that if you don't know the…

Perhaps I'm mishearing but it sounds to me more like they are pronouncing it "yo" (English) or "you" (Chinese) here in Beijing, which does sound more like 6. yi/qi are slightly similar but I never have the same issue. I've given up on trying to be correct and use yi most of the time.

if there's question about pronunciation, i find that putonghua (mandarin) educational material is very good and there are lots of references with clear pictures of what your mouth and tongue should be doing when pronouncing that make it just about impossible to make the wrong sounds (it won't fix your tones though).

it's difficult to describe and people pronounce english words differently so this isn't definitive, but

yao1 is like "yao ming", like if you stub your toe and say "owww!" in pain, or "yowzers!" -- those vowel sounds are all the same for me, so if they are for you too, that's probably the standard sound for "yao" in chinese.

liu4 is much more closed mouth. rather than opening your mouth wide, your mouth will be closed as if you are pronouncing the english name of the letter "e". the vowel sounds are roughly like taking the words "he" and "who", stripping the "h" sounds, and ramming the vowel sounds together. this (for me) sounds similar to the sound a child makes when he/she sees something disgusting and says "Ewwww!" or the english word "few" (the opposite of many). hopefully those 3 also sound the same to you.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#62

Post by beemoe »

dperfect wrote: post #58
zokier wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it doesn't mention punycode directly, it has paragraph referring to IDN: Why don’t Chinese web addresses just use Mandarin characters? Because that’s a pain, too. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which sets the rules for web addresses globally, has periodically hyped the expansion of domain names to include non-Latinate scripts, but Chinese web sites have yet to take full advanta…

Sounds like the core problem is just "Chinese web sites have yet to take full advantage". I'm really wondering how many (or what percentage of) devices actually need "a special plug-in". Seems like it would be a very small - and shrinking - fraction, but I could be wrong. If the user's device is (presumably) already set to use Mandarin (or any specific language), then I assume that would be the default input method,…

>they'd be just as cryptic to me as Mandarin characters

Yes the meaning would be just as cryptic, but the act of typing and probably memorization would be much easier. As an exercise, try downloading an input method for a foreign character set and typing out a string that you see rendered in an image.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#63

Post by ojii »

franzwong wrote: post #47
w1ntermute wrote: post #9

But why is this phenomenon restricted to China? I haven't observed it with, for example, Japanese sites, even though they too use a non-Latin alphabet.

I heard some people say, Japanese use the same way to memorize the year of some historical events

Or chose the heights of new buildings. Tokyo Skytree was built 634 meters high, because that number can be read "Musashi", the name for the ancient province of what is roughly present day Tokyo.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#64

Post by wodenokoto »

ezl wrote: post #30
wodenokoto wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few things things that contribute to this: Market powers in Japan chose early on to advertise their websites not through URLs but through search keywords. They will literally ask you in advertisement to enter certain phrases in a search engine to let you find their web property. Japanese internet usage is traditionally based around cellphones, which traditionally were centered around portals. This is changi…

> Japanese numbers don't lend themselves as easily as Chinese to these double meanings. Japanese words are quite long compared to Chinese ('wo', is Chinese for 'I', the Japanese equivelant is 'watashi') I think this is false. Japanese is quite rich for this. It's not worth debating whether Chinese lends itself more to this than Japanese, but as a Chinese speaker (cantonese and mandarin) who speaks Japanese, I find th…

After reading this post and your other one, I stand corrected on my the last point.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#65

Post by gk1 »

Kiro wrote: post #4

Great article but I don't understand why the American friend refused to communicate with people whose email addresses consist of numbers.

Until reading this article I assumed every 163.com email I saw was just using one of those temporary email inboxes, for fear of spam emails or due to privacy concerns. I, too, dismissed those emails and considered them as useless as seeing blah@blah.com. Now I know they're actual accounts, just based in China.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#66

Post by tobinfricke »

ytch wrote: post #2

When talking about QQ, does anyone remember ICQ? QQ uses number as ID mainly because it's a knockoff from ICQ at beginning

ICQ is kind of an example of the numbers-website phenomenon in English: the letters themselves are meaningless, but when pronounced sound like "I seek you" (compare to the Alibaba example in the linked article).

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#67

Post by opendomain »

One of the more popular OpenDomains I have is 17m.com - auite a few people ask to use it for a group buying site. This article helped me see the importance of numbers, but when I looked it up on google translate but could not understand what '17m' was supposed to mean. Can anyone tell me?

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#68

Post by zht »

mirkules wrote: post #41

"Hotmail.com might as well be Cyrillic". This is not a good comparison because Cyrillic (at least, the slavic version) has almost a one-to-one relation to its latin counterparts. Russian Cyrillic is a little more complex, with letter modifiers (like "soft sign" and "hard sign") while in other flavors like Serbian Cyrillics, those characteristics were built into the language. Hotmail.com directly transliterated to Cyr…

So how many Americans would be able to type хотмаил.цом?

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#69

Post by jamesli »

Because digit numbers are not foreign to Chinese. As simple as that.

The majority of Chinese don't speak any western languages. A domain name of letters is no different from a random combination of letters to them, even if the name is composed of real words in English, Spanish, or French, etc. They are completely foreign. While a combination of digits is not, like phone numbers, zip codes, bus numbers, train numbers, etc. They deal with them everyday.

My parents don't speak any other languages other than Mandarin. [To be accurate, my mother spoke some Mongolian, and my father spoke a little Russian, when they were young. But they couldn't speak any of them now.] They have no problem in recognize and pronounce the 26 letter in English. After I have been living in American for so many years, they still can't spell my home address. They remember my phone numbers and my house numbers, though, but not the street names. Think about it. It is amazing. Because I find it is much easier to remember street names than phone numbers. Phone numbers are simply a random combination of digits, except the area code.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#70

Post by ddoolin »

This phenomenon is also visible in Korea, except the way to navigate to popular websites is to search Naver, Daum, or Google with the Korean name of the website and then hit the top link. I found it very strange at first but completely understandable given they typical just know the name of websites via their names translated into Korean letters.

e.g. Facebook -> 페이스북 (페북); Pretty interesting.

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