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...
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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...
Why two calculators give you different birth charts
The same birth details can produce different charts because the tradition has argued for centuries about when a day begi...
What happens to Chinese punctuation when text runs vertically
Turning Chinese sideways does not turn its punctuation sideways. Quotation marks become different characters entirely, t...
There is no single order to learn Chinese characters
There are at least four orderings, built for different jobs, and they disagree about the first hundred characters more t...
The Chinese characters a bank computer cannot store
A rare character in a legal name fails in four different ways that look identical from the counter. One of them does not...
Why your DNA ancestry estimate is vaguer if you are Asian
A result full of "Broadly" labels is telling you something real, but not about your ancestry. One company's own document...
What a country will let you name a child
A name generator hands you something that sounds right; a registrar decides whether it can be recorded. Japan now regist...
Why Tet and Chinese New Year sometimes fall a month apart
In 1985 Vietnam celebrated on 21 January and China on 20 February. The explanation everyone gives for the usual one-day...
Why two websites give you different life path numbers
Numerology has two standard ways of doing the arithmetic, and for about one birthday in eight they disagree. The dispute...
How to Self-Host Home Assistant with Docker
Running the container instead of a supervised install gives up the add-on store, which is a real trade. And bridge netwo...
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