‘Our Newest Member’ is 德特金生 Can we just call him/her Jin Sheng?
I foresee a name change in the immediate future…
Is that what that translates to? Correct me if I’m wrong, since they’re is a difference in dialects and nuace to the written word in Chinese that one doesn’t see in English, but I believe that says “Johnny L.A. Can Bite the Wax Tadpole”
I’ve never had a problem with hard to type names. I always copy and paste them anyway.
Just looks like boxes to me. Let’s call him “Boxy.”
Don’t you people get it? It’s obviously “four square”, our favorite childhood playground game.
I can’t read it properly (in that I don’t know what the sounds are) but the last three characters mean “special”, “gold” and “life” respectively!
Okay, even the search function will have nothing to do with it. How the heck did that happen?!
Using Firefox or Internet Explorer, how can I make it so I can actually see those charaters, instead of a string of boxes or question makrs?
Johnny L.A.,
I need to know what it means before I put the characters on the vertical, put it in 72 point, have it enlarged, and then hang it over my dining room buffet.
I am not joking. The script is so beautiful in the font that prints – and I can’t trust any of you to give me words that are not obscene.
Firefox: Go to the menu bar and follow the path:
View>Character Encoding>More>East Asian>Chinese Traditional(Big5)
It took me a few refreshes for everything to take effect.
Internet Explorer:
View>Encoding>More>Chinese Traditional(Big5)
(I cheated. I found this using Google)
The first one is “toku” “virtue”, which I believe is the same character as in Tokugawa.
Tokutoku Kinsei - Virtuous Special Golden Life.
Fancy.
Close. It’s actually translates to “Happy hour special on Michelob Golden”
I dunno. I just cut’n’pasted into babelfish. 
(BTW, the first character doesn’t display for me.)
If that’s meant to be Chinese rather than ganji, it’s probably an English or other European name forcibly translated to Chinese. Tourist places in Hong Kong have lots of those. 德特 sounds like Ted.
I don’t get it. 
What’s so hard to prononce about 德特金生? 你好, 德特金生 
Well, for one thing, most Han surnames consist of only one character (and syllable). The given names usually have two characters, and sometimes one. A random Chinese name you pick out of a hat would probably consist of three characters.
So someone with a four-charactered name would have, to the majority of Chinese speakers,
- A strange sounding name.
- An extra syllable. That’s a 33% increase in effort required to pronounce the name!
- A large red beard. (This is conjecture).
Ah, I see. The thing is, unless we should meet a doperfest, I will never actually have to pronounce it, and can simply cut and paste his name, should I need to say something to him, or compliment a point he made.
Where is this guy, anyway? We must have him explain himself! :mad:
Well, you want to ask him, his profile is here, and he just started a topic called The Origins of “wind” and “wind”