Tempo charts disagree on how many beats a minute Andante means
Six published sources give Andante anywhere from 56 to 108 beats a minute, and by our count only 76 and 77 fall inside a...
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Cake tin size charts hold up on area swaps and vary on cups
Scaling a recipe to another cake tin by base area keeps the batter as deep as the recipe intended, while the tin's capac...
Dog pregnancy length and why counting from mating widens the due date
A dog's pregnancy averages about 63 days counted from ovulation, but how wide the window is depends on which event start...
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Japan's new kanji forms coincide with the mainland's in about a third of pairs
Japan fixed simpler print forms for its everyday kanji in 1949, and the 2010 Jōyō list still prints an old Kangxi form b...
Over a third of a Hokkien dictionary's syllables change between Pe̍h-ōe-jī and Tâi-lô
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) and Tâi-lô are two ways of writing Hokkien in Latin letters, and Tâi-lô is the scheme Taiwan's Ministry...
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...
Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong codes set stair risers lower than a US layout assumes
Singapore's Fire Code and Hong Kong's Fire Safety Code limit risers in their escape stairs to 175 mm, and Malaysia's bui...
A cat's age in human years is read off a chart printed with no stated basis
The usual cat-years chart gives 15 human years for a cat's first year, 24 by its second birthday and 4 for each year aft...
Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer agree on 15.8% of a Korean learner's dictionary
Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer both spell Korean as it is pronounced, yet they spell only 15.8% of the 44,03...
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...
Taiwan's marriage law extends to second cousins, and other ways cousins are counted
A cousin's degree and removal come from counting the generations from each person up to the ancestor they share. Counted...
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...
Chinese knots are far older than the name a 1981 Taipei book made common in Taiwan
The name Chinese knot (中國結) became common in Taiwan after a 1981 Taipei book, according to the Taipei City Government...
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...
Kakak is an older sister in Malaysia and any older sibling in Indonesia
Malaysia's Kamus Dewan Perdana defines kakak as an older sister; Indonesia's KBBI defines it as an older sibling. Malay...
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...
Japan's 2020 school kanji table moved more characters than it added
Japanese elementary schools teach 1,026 kanji. The 2020 table added 20 prefecture kanji and moved 37 others between year...
Singlish and Manglish words in the Oxford English Dictionary
Which Singapore and Malaysian English words the OED has recorded and when: 21 Singapore entries in 2016 and a second wav...
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...
Public holidays 2027 and the best days to take leave in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong
The 2027 public holidays in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, the longest breaks a few days of leave can buy in each, w...
How Singapore postcodes work, from the sector to the block number
The first two digits of a Singapore postcode are the postal sector, which maps to one of 28 districts; for an HDB flat t...
What to call your relatives in Chinese, and why one in five has more than one answer
Of 1,195,740 family relationships up to six steps, about 53% have one standard Chinese term, 20% could be several people...
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