Don’t know what flavor of Chinese. Or even if it is Chinese.
Going by the pictograph, I’m guessing it says something like “Don’t touch my Gundam/Transformer action figures or I will hit you with a baseball bat.”
But what does it actually say?
It’s in traditional characters, but is Mandarin. At least Google Translate thinks it is when I typed in the Pinyin (official PRC romanization system) from the sign. Google puts it in simplified characters as follows:
警告
不要动我模型以免产生伤害！
Here it is in traditional characters as in the sign:
警告
不要動我模型以免產生傷害
Same source for translation gives:
Warning
Don’t move my model to avoid harm
Warning!
Don’t touch my figures/models
To avoid injury/harm
Interesting, I’ve never heard of this before. Do I understand correctly it’s a way to help non-native speakers learn to speak or write Mandarin? I know you’ve lived in that part of the world (Korea and China, no?) for a long time, do you consider yourself fluent in either language?
Darn, I was hoping for something a little funnier. Thanks for your help!
Thanks for the confirmation! I feel honored that you used one of your rare posts to answer my question. 
This was how I was taught the pronunciation as a child (as a Malaysia Chinese). However, this poster is missing the diacritics that indicate the tone used to pronounce each word.
A note on the poster; this is a common sentiment among figure/model collectors. When you have friends/family with children visiting, the children see your collection and will want to take them out to play with. What the children/their parents generally fail to realize is that the figures/models aren’t toys, and when the child inevitably breaks/damages them, the adults won’t re-compensate the collector for the damages done. “It’s okay, it’s just a toy!”
It would appear that the pictograph did its job well, then.
Here is the excellent Wiki article on Pinyin. It’s part of a People’s Republic of China government reform of the written language and, in fact, is taught to Chinese in the PRC at a young age. It also is the main computer input system in the PRC for typing Chinese characters on both computers and cellphones.
I used to be fluent in the standard dialect (Seoul) of South Korean, but that was quite some time ago. I’m currently in Beijing and have been taking a basic Chinese course once a week that my employer offers us foreign teachers. Of course, near the end of the semester, most of us end up skipping the course because of our teaching and administrative duties for semester-end.
Pinyin is a lot easier, ISTM, than some other systems of Chinese input for computers. Check out this Wiki article. A related issue is something called character amnesia.
And you’re welcome!
p.s. Personally, I think the Chinese would be well-served to adopt the same writing reform the Vietnamese did.
Why? Chinese currently has the advantage of being very compact on the page, with so many words taking up only 1 or 2 characters.
At what cost for memorization? The advantage of saving space is not matched by the disadvantage of the huge number of characters. If you want to save space and memorization both, go with Korea’s system. By the way, Korean also used to be written with Chinese characters. There is still some use of them in Korea, but not as much as before.
I would say that the case for reform has got weaker in the information age.
IME, Chinese people who have been through the education system (which in the cities is everyone, I can’t speak for the proportion in rural China), can read sentences as least as quickly as native English speakers read English.
The main disadvantages of the character-based system seemed to me:
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Handwritten documents are hard to read. I mean for native Chinese. However, handwritten documents are less and less common.
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If someone has an unusual name, it can be necessary to ask “Is your surname pronounced long?” say. But of course nowadays the name has been written on an electronic form, and if the recipient cares how it is pronounced they’ll be some popup that will tell them.
(In some senses you could say this is a bigger problem in English. If someone’s name is really rare it can be hard to google a pronunciation, and if it comes from another language, maybe you can’t pronounce it the correct way at all).
That’s part of the problem, so many people using computer input. Apparently many people cannot correctly make the characters by hand now because they have zero practice in it.
Not everyone in the city’s has been through all 12 years of primary and secondary school, sadly. And it’s been very recent (within the last couple of years, IIRC) that finally every community in the country now has schools. Reforming the writing system, IMHO, would go a long way to making getting an education here easier.
Sure but it’s similar to calligraphy or even cursive in the West. Why should we mandate all kids learn these if many will not use them?
Getting an education for poorer areas is more a function of availability of teachers and resources, it’s certainly debatable whether it’s due to difficulties in the writing system.
Anyway, changing the system now is about as likely as spelling reform in English. Even for younger Chinese who switch often between Pinyin and Hanzi (characters), they are still probably most comfortable seeing the latter. So there is no push to focus more on pinyin.
A different angle: it seems like such reform would not help people who read and write languages using Chinese characters, but do not use standard Mandarin Chinese.
I wouldn’t call myself a collector since I break the cardinal rule of taking the figures out of the box. I also repaint most of them. It’s just a hobby for me but I still wouldn’t let kids play with them.
Yep, works pretty well across all languages. Nobody is going to misunderstand that one.
That looks like it would be a lot easier to learn for a newbie like me simply because of the familiar letters.
I could see how that would happen. It seems a bit like losing fluency in a language from non use.
I was surprised at the number of languages, not to mention dialects, that are spoken in China. I would have thought the government would have pushed for a standard language. Can a rural person from northern China easily talk to someone from a southern city?
Thanks to all for helping me out!
How about this one?
昨風起西北，萬艘皆乘便。今風轉而東，我舟十五縴。力乏更雇夫，百金尚嫌賤。舡工怒鬭語，夫坐視而怨。添槹亦復車，黃膠生口咽。河泥若祐夫，粘底更不轉。添金工不怒，意滿怨亦散。一曳如風車，叫噉如臨戰。傍觀鸎竇湖，渺渺無涯岸。一滴不可汲，況彼西江遠。萬事須乘時，汝來一何晩。朱邦彥自秀寄紙、呉江舟中作，米元章。
Seeing as I can’t understand it in English after using an online translator, I’m gonna have to give up. 
That’s a short question with a long answer.
Basically, many provinces have their own dialect of Chinese. These are called “dialects” partly for political reasons and partly because they share a written language. But the spoken language can be as different as English and German. Perhaps more different.
Here is a wiki with a map of the dialects and videos of an example sentence.
(Note that some of the provinces that are just “Mandarin” on this map actually officially have their own dialect but one that is close enough to Mandarin that this is a minor quibble).
Mandarin Chinese derives from a dialect of nearby Beijing*. So Northern-Eastern Chinese generally speak the closest to “standard” Mandarin Chinese, whether rural or city-dwellers.
Everywhere else on the mainland, basically everyone understands standard Mandarin as the lingua franca even if it’s not their first language.
However, when they speak Mandarin it might be difficult for others to understand, as they may speak it with a thick accent and various local colloquialisms. Certainly I have been present in situations where one native chinese person spoke Mandarin and another native chinese person could not understand anything they said because the speaker’s Mandarin was “too local”.
So, in terms of your question…yes and no. Probably. But maybe not.
* Several cities in the north-east seem to claim that they are the home of true Mandarin, so I try to avoid saying any particular place…
Which is one reason I expect China to stick with the existing written language, which is widely understood by people whose spoken languages may be rather different.
How universal is it? I was in Japan (which stole China’s writing) several years ago with a friend who reads Chinese. And he could make out basic information, such as “that place is a noodle shop” solely based on his knowledge of written Chinese. That’s actually quite valuable. Perhaps moreso than a written language that has an alphabet and maps to one of the dominant dialects.
Obviously, Chinese has had a lot of cultural influence over millennia. As for a Japanese speaker recognizing random Chinese words, or vice versa, roughly 20% of words used in common speech are borrowings (see Sino-Japanese vocabulary - Wikipedia), plus thousands of Chinese characters are used to write Japanese, so that is not amazing, even though the language itself is not related.
However, consider the fact that a Japanese high-school student might have had a few semesters of kanbun (essentially classical Chinese) or simply studied vernacular Chinese as a foreign language. So the question becomes, how universal is Chinese education in countries like Japan, Korea, Vietnam, or the USA for that matter. Korean and Vietnamese do not really use Chinese characters to a significant extent any more; it’s really Chinese and Japonic languages these days that do. But I imagine a Chinese tourist may have to go far afield before he or she cannot find anyone who understands written Chinese, even if the street signs be in Hungarian.