Sunday, April 3, 2005

VOA News: Americans Misuse Chinese Characters



Voice of America (VOA)
recently has aired a report titled "Americans Misuse Chinese Characters" by Ted Landphair based on Hanzi Smatter.

Here is some background information about VOA:

"The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 100 million people."

The two examples featured in the report are "Cow Elephant Chicken Lucky Unicorn Dragon Crane Liu Shallow" and "Crazy Diarrhea". According to Ms. Naomi Chaney, the owner of "crazy diarrhea", she got the tattoo "as a joke to people who get stupid shit tattooed on themselves without knowing what it was".

Broadcast audios:

873 KB mp3 via VOAnews.com
873 KB mp3 via hanzismatter.com



2 comments:

  1. And the popularity grows :-D

    This is why I kind of dislike pinyin for the uninformed. I'd much rather listen to someone try to say "han-tzu" than hanzee.

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  2. that excuse for getting the tattoo is the worst rationalization ever. if that was truly the case, she could have just gotten something else that was absurd that didn't say diarrhea. what an ass.

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