Message from Clay Dube

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,

Britney Spears and many other celebrities have embraced 汉字 hanzi (Chinese for characters) or kanji (Japanese for characters) and millions of others have followed suit. My guess is that most tattoo parlors offer them as possible designs.

Not every tattoo works out quite as the buyer/wearer might hope. Hanzi Smatter is a wonderful website offering photos and translations of what problematic inscriptions actually say.

http://www.hanzismatter.com/

A post from 12/26 is great. Someone has produced an iPhone app that has assigned characters, randomly, to letters in the English alphabet. The program will allow you to "add mystery to your writing." Essentially, this is like a Captain Midnight Decoder Ring (no, I'm not actually old enough to remember that radio program, but the item was passed down as a family treasure) or any code that assigns symbols, numbers, or other letters to any letter. The app website allows you to try it out. So I typed "This is a hopelessly dumb program" and the program gave me 七升工弓 工弓 月 升口戶三心三弓弓心了 力臼冊官 戶尺口巨尺月冊. (You need to have East Asian languages enabled to see characters -- Windows users do this via start | control panel | regional and language options.)

Here's the website for you to try:

http://goodcharacters.com/alphabet/alphabetweb.php

The programmer says:
"Once you learn how to use this writing system, you no longer have to worry about others reading your diary or other secrets! Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans will recognize the characters, but the combination of characters won't make sense to them. And people who cannot read Chinese won't even try to read it. Isn't it cool?"

I think it is dumb, but I know that students think the characters are cool and mysterious and I highly recommend finding ways to introduce them. A simple way to start is with the months of the year, which are just numbers: January is 一月 or first month.

Tim Xie at Cal State Long Beach has put together a list of web resources that offer tools and ideas you may find useful. At the very least let's hope our students will know enough not to get mirror tattoos (where the characters are reversed, which is like spelling reversed this way: desrever).