Counting to THR三三

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!

Mando-lish-nese: the trilingual bookstore name

In the heart of Hong Kong's Causeway Bay (the shopping district with the highest rent in the world, higher even than New York's Fifth Avenue, and double that of Tokyo's Ginza district), I saw this book store:

... and the name of the place really intrigued me. You can see it better here:

If I were to tell you that the English name is derived from the Chinese name, would you believe me? Possibly not, so let me take you through my logic ...

• 樂文 = Luck-Win  (In Simplified characters it's 乐文, but ignore that for now - this is HK)
• You probably know 樂 from 快樂 (kuàilè = happy, S=快乐) - and 樂 by itself means 'happy', not 'lucky'
• Similarly 文 is from 文化 (wénhuà = culture), and 文 by itself means 'culture' not 'win'

So what's going on?

• The first clue is that 文 is pronounced wén in Mandarin, and that sounds exactly like 'win'
• But that hasn't solved the problem, because 樂 is pronounced 'le' and not 'luck'
• So now we leap across to Cantonese, where 樂 is actually pronounced 'lok', and yes - that does sound a little like 'luck'

So I thought that was cute - like many Chinese brands, the name of the book store is so positive (Luck-Win), and actually the English name can be derived from Chinese ... but not from the meaning of the characters, only from the pronunciation.  And even better than that, one comes from Cantonese pronunciation, and one comes from Mandarin pronunciation.

I think my next project will be an online Mando-lish-nese dictionary. Clearly there is need for something like that :-)