Mainland and Taiwan telegraph codebooks nearly always give a Hong Kong ID card character the same code below 8000
The four-digit groups under a Chinese name on a Hong Kong identity card are telegraph codes, which the Immigration Depar...
Guides & How-tos · Worked examples · Real numbers
Do it right, with real numbers
Step-by-step how-tos, head-to-head comparisons and honest roundups — every guide worked through with current figures, then backed by a RECATOOLS calculator or AI-directory entry so you can act on it.
510 guides published
17 topic areas
Latest guide Oct 2026
Statistics
35
Health & Wellness
33
Cybersecurity
30
Business
19
Privacy & Data
17
Consumer Tech
14
ASEAN Tech
13
Personality
9
Cloud & Infra
8
Cyber Threat Intel
7
Sustainability
5
Advertisement
The 3,500 commonest Chinese characters mostly have an exact Mandarin homophone
By Unicode's Unihan 17.0 readings, 89% of the 3,500 first-level characters on mainland China's 2013 standard list share...
Neither Chinese punctuation standard requires full-width marks
Mainland China's punctuation standard and Taiwan's handbook measure marks in character cells and never require full-widt...
Advertisement
A Simplified-first pinyin library trips over Taiwan's Zhuyin readings
Run the text of Taiwan's primary-school dictionary through pinyin-pro, a widely used pinyin library, and it disagrees wi...
Mandarin rhymes share a Pingshui rhyme group about half the time
Two level-tone characters that rhyme exactly in Putonghua share a 平水韵 group only about half the time, by our count of...
South Korea's limit on hanja in names is an exact sum of three lists
South Korea's schools have a list of 1,800 basic hanja, and its name rules allow 9,389 entries (인명용 한자), which is t...
Xiehouyu are mostly metaphors, and many Mandarin puns miss in Cantonese
外甥打燈籠──照舅 is a pun in Mandarin and not in Cantonese. Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary lists 305 xiehouyu...
Classical Chinese particles, counted in the Analects and Mencius
About a quarter of the Analects and Mencius is 23 small grammatical words. How often 之, 也, 矣, 焉 and 乎 appear, which...
How to tell the upper line of a Spring Festival couplet from the lower
How to tell the upper line of a spring couplet (春联, 春聯) from the lower, which side each goes on, why the Mandarin to...
Writing a xiangqi move in Chinese, WXF and ICCS notation
How Chinese chess (象棋) moves such as 炮二平五 are written, why Red and Black number the files differently, when 前 and...
How Chinese internet slang is made, and what the annual word lists keep
How Chinese internet slang is built, from yyds and 520 to 内卷 and 躺平, and what China's three annual 网络流行语 lists...
Chinese measure words ranked by how often they are actually used
How often 个 really fills the measure-word slot in Chinese text, which two dozen classifiers (量词) cover nine tenths of...
Advertisement