Chinese

汉字

Logograms · 36 letters

One sign per word, and thousands to remember. No reading shortcut: what pays off in a round is not reading but recognising a few frequent shapes. Chinese, and the Japanese that borrows them.

Open the guide

What pays off on the road

• Traditional: Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macao. The language alongside usually decides — Portuguese says Macao, English with British street names Hong Kong, pinyin Taiwan.
• 臺北, 臺中, 臺南: the name says where on the island — north, centre, south.
• Reading a name: the last sign gives the level — 市 city, 縣 county, 鄉 rural township, 鎮 town, 里 neighbourhood, the commonest of our names.

How it works

Thirty signs, not three thousand

A guide promising to teach Chinese would be a page you close. This one promises nothing of the sort: it holds some thirty characters, the ones that come back on every sign in Taiwan.

That is little and it is a lot. The administrative suffixes end every place name, the cardinal points sit in the names of the largest cities, and the road words cover everything written in blue or green above a carriageway.

We ask what a character means and never how it reads. A character is pronounced several ways depending on the word: asking how 市 reads has no answer out of context, whereas what it means does.

Traditional or simplified: which side of the strait

Mainland China simplified its characters in the nineteen fifties. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao did not follow, and still write the older forms.

臺灣 is written 台湾 in Beijing. 縣 becomes 县, 東 becomes 东, 車 becomes 车. Traditional forms have more strokes and a denser look; simplified ones are airier and rounder.

This is the most profitable thing on this page: it places a photo on one side of the strait or the other before a single word has been read. And it holds for Hong Kong and Macao, which write as Taiwan does.

To tell the three apart, look at the language alongside. As a rule, Macao doubles its street plates in Portuguese — blue and white, Rua, Avenida, Travessa —, Hong Kong its signs in English, with British-style names, Road, Street, Queen's; Taiwan mostly romanises in pinyin, names full of x, q and zh.

The name says where you are

臺北 is "Tai-north", 臺中 "Tai-middle", 臺南 "Tai-south", 臺東 "Tai-east". Four of the island's main cities carry their position in their name.

Reading a single one of these characters is enough to place a photo to within three hundred kilometres, which is a great deal on an island four hundred long. No other page in this section offers such a return.

The first character is written two ways, 臺 and 台, and both are current in Taiwan itself: our packs carry 臺北市 and 台中市 side by side. This is not the traditional-simplified split, it is an accepted shorthand.

Where this guide stops

There is no place name quiz here, and not only because a character has several readings: Taiwanese names are officially transliterated in pinyin, which nothing in the character gives.

What the guide delivers is recognition: knowing you are looking at traditional forms, reading the suffix that ends a name, spotting a cardinal point. That is what one actually does in front of a photo, and it is measured by the sign and word quizzes.

Cheat sheet

What ends a place name

Seven characters, one of which — 里 — is the commonest in all our Taiwanese names. Reading the last sign of a name gives the administrative rung, and so the size of the place.

The cardinal points

The best return on the page: four of Taiwan's main cities carry their position in their name, and a single character read places a photo to within three hundred kilometres.

What is read on the road

The words of signs and addresses. Taiwanese addresses nest — road, lane, number — and seeing three numbers separated by these signs is enough to recognise an address.

Traditional against simplified

Taiwan's form first, the mainland's beside it. This is the most profitable thing on the page: it places a photo on one side of the strait or the other before a word has been read.

The numbers

For reading a road number or an address. They assemble simply: 十一 is eleven, 二十 is twenty.

The words on signs

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