Following on from the recent post I did on The 'correct' (sic) way to count in Chinese, it reminded me of a sign I saw when visiting Singapore on business a couple of weeks ago. I think it was a restaurant, and the name of the place was: FIV五
I liked that :-) It was an interesting way of merging the English alphabet with Chinese characters, and I started wondering how much I could extend this ...
In terms of single digit numbers, this is what I came up with ...
ZER零
(ONE)
(TWO)
THR三三
F四UR
FIV五
SI六
SE七EN
EIG八T
九I九E
十EN
Sadly, 1 & 2 can't be done nicely, and even 0, 4 & 7 are pushing it a bit!
For bigger numbers ...
百UNDRED
千HOUSAND
万EN 万HOUSAND
HUNDRED M亿LION
(I'm quite proud of the last one, but the way. Be sure to leave comments below to tell me how much it impressed you too :-)
Will this make the quality of your life better? No.
Will it help you learn Chinese better? I doubt it.
Is it interesting? I think so.
Should you leave a comment below? Absolutely!
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I love this! How creative! I personally loved 7, it was my favorite. Thousand, Ten Thousand, and Hundred Million are so cute too! Did you ask the owners why they decided to name it that?
ReplyDeleteThanks for another fun & interesting post!
I was just in a taxi going past when I saw the sign - next time (April) I will see if I can get the time to pop in, or even eat there.
DeleteCool listing!
ReplyDeleteWhat about tw二? 我觉得还可以 ;)
Look what we did with a group of children from primary school, thanks to your idea :D
Deletehttp://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2nn7l4&s=6
(the ONE is not very clear, but the middle one for the E is meant to be yi)
Mariano, great to hear from you.
DeleteFirstly, I obviously considered 'tw二' and decided it wasn't good enough to include. But looking at it now, a few weeks after writing the article, I guess it's not so bad :-)
Secondly, I love the poster you've created! Do you teach Chinese to children? That's really nice as a project!