Chinese character test
 

At the request of a Fodor's editor, this is a test of whether the revised site will accept Chinese characters and tone-marked pinyin or not.

定火车票电话

(Means 'telephone number for booking railway tickets'.

Vowel with four tone-marks:

ā á ǎ à

ü with four tone-marks (although not all four are actually used):

ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ

Peter N-H

Bingo.

If you don't see Chinese characters and tone-marked pinyin here you need to adjust your browser's display languages (or buy a Mac).

Why the fuss?

The ability to display Chinese means that those of us with some literacy in the language can occasionally provide the characters for destinations or street names or foods than enable the independent traveller with no Mandarin to get around China and obtain what he or she wants, simply by printing out the posting and showing the characters to taxi drivers, ticket sellers, waitresses, etc.

Peter N-H

Wonderful. My Mac and I are happy.

ding huo che piao dian hua, not on a Mac.

xie xie

Testing to see if the new forum can display Thai characters:

กิน

OMG it can!

ขอบคุฌ Fordors!

金魚 きんぎょ キンギョ

means goldfish ;)

kanji, hiragana,katakana

Wow first typo in Thai on Fodors. I meant to say "ขอบคุณ Fordors!"

That's odd.

I can get the Thai but not the Chinese!

Who's been fiddling with my computer?????

hanuman, i thought you made an error in your thai, but of course, i'm too much of a gentleman to have corrected you.:-)

btw, how do you all do this? ht, for one who avoids sakana, goldfish??lol

Ken,

I have a Thai/English keyboard so that helps a lot ครับ.

Please help!

Which version of Chinese should I have?

I've accessed "View", "Character Encoding", etc. and have requested three traditional Chinese and one simplified and the Chinese text is still not appearing.

What's wrong?

easytraveler - can you see chinese characters on other websites? Is it just the ones here on fodors that you cann't see?

Actually, the first character in the Chinese was also a typo. This is the problem of using keyboard entry rather than handwriting. Should read:

订 (火车票电话)

But the main point is that unlike when the site was relaunched, the characters can now be seen.

我不可能鍵入汉字 from http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt

That was supposed to be 'I cannot type chinese characters'. Bad translation from babelfish.

kuranosuke,

Howzit bruddah? I just did it cause I wanted to karang the Hauoli Pake Luna's alahs, lol

Everyone is now googeling to no avail, lol

See you Sat nite!

Aloha!

yk,

I'm not in the habit of accessing Chinese language text, but there was one site yesterday that came up and it had Chinese characters on it as well as English.

so, I guess the problem is with just the Fodors' site.

Thanks for asking us to fix/add this Peter---I'm glad we were able to. It sounds like it's not working for everyone though. Easytraveler-- do you see the characters above or are you saying you are unable to add them yourself? Maybe I can find a solution.

easytraveler - The reason I asked was because I got a new mini-laptop a few months ago, and I couldn't read any Chinese character on any webpage (they show up as jumbles). It turns out that I had to download some program (free) which fixed the problem. But in my case, it was every single website I went to, not just one particular site.

Katie: Thanks for offering to help!

No, I can't see the Chinese characters at all on Fodors. The Thai comes through fine, which makes it so odd.

Is there something I should download from Fodors to access the Chinese characters?

yk: I use google and if you go into "View" you'll see "Character Encoding", then a whole bunch of different languages that you can access for free.

Hi easytraveler

That's what I did initially, but it still didn't work no matter which encoding I chose (simplified Chinese, traditional chinese etc). It turns out that my new computer did not come equipped with the East Asian languages file, which I had to install with the Windows XP CD. Once I installed that, it worked fine.
http://newton.uor.edu/Departments&Pr...lation_XP.html

Hmm... you know I'm not sure. I'll forward this to our developers.

I see them! I nominate Peter to begin teaching Fodor's Chinese classes!

katie: thanks again!

yk: I've been playing with your website, but still no go. It's probably because I don't have the Microsoft disks since mine is an iMac and everything came installed already.

But I'm still playing around with it.

When I went into Shaoxing in Tripadvisor and looking at the hotel rated third on their list, the map on the right shows Chinese characters, but the second review, written in Chinese, does not show up!

Must be just my computer and it's doesn't have the correct software loaded.

Well, ek, not for the chinese as 1st language Fodorites with teaching credentials and will serve tea and xiaolongbao when you fly west for private lessons.

Hi easytraveler, are you able to read wiki pages in chinese?
for example:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...&variant=zh-hk

Hmm... I'm hungry
=P~

yk, we'll serve chashaobao/bbq buns (don't know how to say it cantonese) when you come!

easy traveler, Macs usually display the characters without any coaching. Mine does. You might check the Mac help files on this.

ht, lmao, rotf. good one.

sake on namken(ice in thai). correct me if i'm wrong, hanuman.:-)

yk: this is so weird.

I clicked on your link and the wikipedia logo shows Chinese characters, but not the text!

At first I thought it was simplified vs classical (or whatever they call the older form of writing), but that's not it.

Kathie: that's a thought. I'll switch over to OS and access this thread from there.

Woohoo! GOT IT!

Thanks a mil, Kathie! :)

Switched over to Mac OS and all the Chinese characters came through loud and clear!

Katie: Seems like it's just my computer when it's on Windows. have to work on this mystery.

yk: no wonder you're hungry! That's quite a site (sight)!

And, you can search for the chinese text: http://www.fodors.com/search/results...include_text=1

OK, it seems that everybody did not get the point.

Most non-Asian localized Windows versions do not install the Asian language package be default. That's why a few people on this thread had issues. Also, some chinese language text on the website is displayed as graphic, no encoded and rendered by browswer. Therefore, a few of you got confused as well.

To make sure that you computer has the required Asian language set, go to Start\Settings\Control\, the double click Regional and Language Options

In the new window, click the middle tab (Language), and check Install files for East Asian languages and hit OK.

You computer should start to find the language file in the original Windows installation disk. Once the file is located, just follow the on-screen instructions.

If you do not have the original installation disk, you can download the file from the Microsoft website. Just google it. More info is on this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d....mspx?mfr=true

On the same page, you can find the IME to type in Chinese character with a US (or any other language) keyboard.

Hope that helps.

祝大家旅途愉快 Have a nice trip

Ok, I hope I can post in Japanese below.

桜、桜、弥生の空は、見渡す限り....
( Sakura Song )

Yes, it worked.

This kinda makes me sad that I'm not going to Asia this year*:

Print out Fodor's advice in the characters, hop in cab, smile and depart! (Hey, it worked with my guidebook that had pinyin and Chinese characters.)


*Of course, I am pretty excited that I'm going to Chile and Easter Island instead. So how do I make an n with a tilde?

Oh, Sakura (Cherry Blossom) is such a beautiful song!

How does one access that?

Through Windows or through Mac? \

Here's a youtube version:

http://vodpod.com/watch/3081028-saku...se-folk-song-1