Chinese Number Websites • Hacker News Board

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#81

Post by arrrg » Sun, May 04, 2014, 10:00 PM UTC

jamesli wrote: post #69

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,…

That makes complete sense. The number system is quite universal and global, writing systems are not, or at least not to the same extent.

I would be lost if you asked me to type in a Cyrillic URL (and Cyrillic is quite similar to Latin script, all things considered!), I wouldn’t even know where to start if you asked me to type something from an even more different writing system in.

I suppose English is on its way to gain some of the same universality as Arabic numbers, but it’s still a far way away from that.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#82

Post by vorg » Sun, May 04, 2014, 10:05 PM UTC

khuey wrote: post #60

yzhou wrote: post #34

the point of using number in the domain is, a lot of Chinese people don't know letters, they don't know English words and they can't get "PinYin"(using letters to represent Chinese words) right. How do you make these people type urls in the browser? well, luckily, they all know numbers!

Are there really computer-literate Mandarin speakers in China who don't know pinyin? How do they input text? The only serious non-pinyin IMEs I'm aware of are the bopomofo ones for traditional characters in Taiwan.

Mandarin speakers in some parts of China speak their Mandarin differently, so can't remember the exact pinyin. E.g. around Wuhan people can't remember whether a word ends with -ang or -an, similarly with -eng and -en. As a foreigner, I can't remember nu and nv, similarly lu and lv. Beijingers have trouble with -r endings.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#83

Post by vorg » Sun, May 04, 2014, 10:09 PM UTC

ezl wrote: post #26

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.

Japanese does have the phenomenon of being able to ascribe meaning to digits though, even though it's not common to do so in URLs. In school in japan, kids often learn tricks for memorizing multiplication tables and square roots this way, similar to how US high school students have a song for the roots of a quadratic (-b /- root(b^2-4ac... to the tune of Pop Goes The Weasel). For example: sqrt 2 = 1.41421356 (night a…

> Japanese is arguably richer than Chinese for this because there are multiple pronunciations for each digit

In Mandarin Chinese, 0= ling or dong, 1= yi or yao, 2= er or liang.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#84

Post by couchand » Sun, May 04, 2014, 10:11 PM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #76

zht wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The point is that there is a direct transliteration available between cyrillic and latin, and it's also not so culture-dependent as 617.cn is. You could trivially automate that process too.

I thought the point was that it would be tough for an English speaker to find and enter the characters if they were Cyrillic.

The transliteration only has to be done once when registering domains, so it doesn't seem like much of a burden.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#85

Post by lifeisstillgood » Sun, May 04, 2014, 10:38 PM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #42

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No different to "Facebook.com/BigBrand" if that's where most of your audience spends their time online fighting it might be foolish

Well, in the case of Facebook, the audience is actually spending their time on your Facebook page. That's different from if they're just clicking through a search engine to reach your own website.

It's not my Facebook page. It's Zuckerbergs.

Which is kind of the point. Unless people know which URL to type (Disney, New York Times) in other words unless you have an offline brand, you don't have an online brand - you have a relationship with a supplier of customers.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#86

Post by lifeisstillgood » Sun, May 04, 2014, 10:41 PM UTC

So...DNS was a waste of time - we could have stuck with just typing in the dotted quads :-)

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#87

Post by rdtsc » Mon, May 05, 2014, 12:21 AM UTC

jamesli wrote: post #69

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,…

Thank you for sharing that, that makes complete sense.

My parents also don't speak English. They speak Romanian, so when they see English they read it as if it is Romanian. Like if they see "house" they might pronounce it as "hoe-oo-seh" (just say every letter, and pronounce with as if it is from a Romanian alphabet). I guess I never thought what it might be like if it was a completely unpronounceable alphabet like Greek for example. At that point a string of digits would work better.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#88

Post by tn13 » Mon, May 05, 2014, 12:54 AM UTC

I often see many rants on HN about US government and how it is becoming a police state. However I think the fact that internet is US centric is better than the internet where countries like Russia or China have have greater say.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#89

Post by est » Mon, May 05, 2014, 1:49 AM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #8

manifesto wrote: post #7

One reason why Chinese have less difficulty remembering and using these numbers than the western fellows might be the difference in pronunciation. In Chinese, all single digit number has the same structure: a consonant plus a vowel. For example, 7, in Chinese is pronounced as [ch-i:], while in English is pronounced as [ˈsɛvən]. Also, every digit takes the same time to pronounce. For example, a string "123456" is [yi:…

Memorizing the times tables (up to 12·12) is standard in American schools.

Yup, but it's easy to forget. Most Chinese can remember 9x9 up to a very old age.

Re: Chinese Number Websites

#90

Post by csandreasen » Mon, May 05, 2014, 2:07 AM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #25

nether wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Malcolm Gladwell nonsense and not backed up by the fact that Chinese-Americans who learn English first (e.g. Nobel laureate Steven Chu) do just as well as their Chinese counterparts.

But we're talking about an entire country in which most people don't speak English at all. If I have to tell my 55 year old aunt to go to www.hotmail.com then I'd have to spend half an hour describing what English letters to type.

I can imagine it's something like explaining how to change some obscure setting through a GUI interface over the phone, but significantly worse.

On one hand you have: "OK, do you see a button in the lower left? Click that. Now press "Options", then "Configure". What? You don't see those? Which button did you click? ..."

On the other hand you have: "OK, do you see the button that looks like a squiggly line? It's in the top-leftish corner, between the button that has a circle with a small line through it and a button that looks like a comb. Press that one three times..."