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  • roddy 143
  • anonymoose 85
  • skylee 61
  • abcdefg 10
  • mungouk 9
  • Publius 8
  • StChris 8
  • Tomsima 6
  • jbradfor 5
  • ChTTay 4
  • xiaocai 4
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  • Flying Pigeon 2
  • stapler 2
  • DrWatson 2
  • murrayjames 1
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About this blog

Entries in this blog

roddy

Restaurant Riddle

By roddy,

1) Roughly, (or as accurately as you can translate it) what was consumed?

2) What does the establishment request you do not do in order to avoid disorder?

3) I'm not even sure this is possible, but - find a picture of the restaurant and perhaps even dishes . . .

roddy

Guess the brand

By roddy,

Sorry for not posting any Signese lately. 乐不思蜀.

Sorry also for the quality of this one - mobile phone photo taken through the sliding doors of a subway. Should be legible, although I'll help you out with the last character - it's the traditional version of 价.

Your question - what brand is being advertised?

roddy

Money Money Money

By roddy,

From the inside of a Hong Kong minibus - can you, in order of amounts of money referred to, list and explain the various notices. No prizes for the No Smoking one, except perhaps a consolation 'we know you're trying' star sticker.

roddy

Lunchtime quiz

By roddy,

Easy questions today, as you're going to be busy figuring out the handscrawling I suspect.
1) What did I have for lunch?
2) What kind of restaurant was this?
3) You'll need to resort to the Internet for this one, but can anyone name the restaurant?
Everyone who gets it right receives pictures of the meal to print out and keep.
roddy

Cinema Tickets again

By roddy,

Realia collected on a recent evening out.
1) What film did we watch? Summarize the plot and explain for those of us who got confused.
2) Were these full price tickets?
3) Using a subway map and www.bjbus.com, plan a route home to the east gate of Tsinghua University.
skylee

Exhibition

By skylee,

I went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art today and took this picture at the entrance of an exhibition of Wu Guanzhong's paintings. I like Wu's paintings very much, but he passed away in June this year. Before his death he donated many of his works to the museum, thus the exhibition.
See if you can understand what's in the photo.
Here is a 2004 thread on the artist -> Controversial and Billionaire painter
roddy

Three signs . . .

By roddy,

1) What's on sale?
2) Who's selling it?
3) What will it cost?
4) Where can you go to find out more?
5) Wouldn't one sign have done?
roddy

Defacement

By roddy,

Today's mission: Identify the party responsible for this and report him or her to the relevant local police station. Bonus points for anyone who comes up with the scribblers weblog, QQ number or similar info.
It's a 1999 note, and it may have spent some time making its way from the scene of the crime to Beijing, so the culprit may have moved on. Do not let this stop you. Do not give up. Do not lose heart. Justice must be done.
roddy

Toilet Rules

By roddy,

Yet another toilet one, but this time we can all blame Brendan as he took it. I'm very tired, so let's keep this short and sweet - what are the rules?
roddy

Lazy Admin

By roddy,

Every time I walk past this I think 'must look up that first character, which looks like it will be pronounced something like ge but may well not be' but I never actually bother. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to look the darned thing up.
roddy

Guangzhou Subway

By roddy,

A set of photos from the Guangzhou subway, with thanks to xuefang. A lot have English on so I won't propose any questions - but feel free to print them out and recreate that genuine Chinese subway feeling at home.
roddy

Aged ad

By roddy,

The sun and rain recently is aging these adverts nicely.
1) What's for sale
2) Where do they come from?
3) What price are they for sale at?
4) Where should you go to make a purchase? Not sure I would have got this one easily without knowing the area.
roddy

Sunny ad

By roddy,

Apologies for the lack of Signese-love recently, I have been doing other things. Not sure what though.
Here's a hand-scribbled ad stuck up on a window near my local breakfast emporium (ok, McDonald's. Best value coffee in Beijing, I maintain). Rather than just ask you a bunch of questions though, I'm hereby challenging you to transcribe or translate the entire ad. If you can't do it all just do the bits you can.
roddy

Warning

By roddy,

1) What is the sign on?
2) What should you not do?
3) What is there a danger of if you do?
roddy

Declaration of Cheapness

By roddy,

Been meaning to snap this for ages - it's almost out of season now.
1) What has been imported?
2) From where?
3) What price are they available at?
4) What aspect of said items is singled out for praise?
5) What are we wished to be every day?
6) Where's the pun?
7) For extra credit (not sure it's even possible) what is the text at bottom left that I cut off?
roddy

Sick note

By roddy,

Here's one from the entrance to my building.
1) What has happened to the writer of the note?
2) What are readers asked to do?
3) What job do you think the writer does?
4) What's happening at the end of the second line, I can't figure it out?
5) What information did I crop from the bottom?
roddy

Illegal Services

By roddy,

Parsing this one could be tricky as there's no indication where one dodgy service ends and the next starts. Not that this will scare you off, oh intrepid ones.
So, what various types of assistance will the gentlemen on the other end of the phone provide?
roddy

Recharger

By roddy,

My first reaction to this sign (which is on a machine that lets you put money on your Seoul subway card, no transfer of electricity is involved) is that it was a mistranslation. But then I thought maybe it's a normal usage that I don't know about, perhaps in Japanese?
Investigate!
roddy

More dogs...

By roddy,

If you're surprised by the fact that 20% of the signs featured here are about matters of the toilet, please don't be. I merely present a representative sample of those signs available to be snapped on Beijing's streets.
This one's a bit manic, I suspect it may have been written by someone who'd just stepped, yet again, in a Pekingese's little leavings. See what you can make of it.
The very top line I'm fairly sure has a 错别字, although I'm not 100% as I could be misreading the characters somehow.
Enjoy!
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