花 has seven strokes, and eight, and ten
Count it on the mainland and you get seven. Taiwan's education ministry says eight. A 五格 name reading says ten — a num...
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The 226-page book that decides how Macau spells your name
Macau has a statutory table for romanising Cantonese names, running 226 pages of the 1985 gazette. Hong Kong has no rule...
The lookalike domain that is blocked on .com and shown on .ru
The famous all-Cyrillic apple.com impersonation was patched in 2017 and the matter filed as closed. Both major browsers...
Most 火星文 converters are running the same copied file
Feed the same characters to several Martian-text converters and most agree exactly. That looks like a standard. It is on...
Why a converter turns a toast into an obscenity
干杯 converts to 乾杯 correctly. Insert one character and 干了一杯 comes back 幹了一杯, which reads as an obscenity in T...
Most advice on writing Chinese dates quotes a standard that was replaced in 2011
The rules for numbers and dates in Chinese publications were revised in 2011. A great deal of guidance, including the st...
The Chinese festivals that are set by the sun, not the moon
Most Chinese festivals fall on a lunar date, and two of the best known do not. Qingming and the Winter Solstice are fixe...
The character that means a million in Beijing and a million million in Taipei
兆 is the SI prefix for mega on the mainland and for tera in Taiwan. It is not a gap between the two conventions but a s...
Mitochondrial DNA does not use the genetic code you were taught
Four codons differ between the standard genetic code and the one your mitochondria use, and two of them are stop signals...
Japan changed its romanisation rules and left names alone
December 2025 replaced the 1954 standard and made Hepburn the basis after roughly seventy years. It explicitly does not...
Korea's romanisation rules never covered surnames
Apply the official standard to the four commonest Korean surnames and you get Gim, I, Bak and Choe. Passports say Kim, L...
What passports do when you have only one name
The near-universal advice is to write FNU in the empty given-name box. That is not an ICAO rule. The standard says a nam...
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