I can type all three forms of tiĕ
鉄 铁 鐵

You can use the following link t check some characters and their Chinese/Japanese/Korean pronunciation:

http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihansearch.html

See Ya

I discussed the various ways of writing in Taiwan in the article linked to at the beginning of the post.

bryan,

Nice to have someone from Japan visiting my blog. Another one I want to write about is why the word for geisha is written differently in Chinese (藝妓) and Japanese (芸者). It relates a lot to people’s different ideas and understanding about what geisha do.

Pinyin News has already discussed the use of the word in Chinese.

Yes, 鉄 (tetsu) is Japanese and it is used in Japanese words like 鉄道.

Thank you for the really interesting post. It never ceases to amaze me the subtle difference in the form of chinese characters used in Taiwan, Japan and China. I too have wondered why Taiwan is written using simplified characters quite often.

麪 and 麫 are also interesting. Perhaps what was written on the sign wasn’t so irregular after all.

I must add that without unicode, posting both traditional and simplified characters on the same page would be very difficult.

Both of theses characters are considered as simplified forms of 麵 (mian4) , but PRC uses a phonetic simplification or 面 (mian4)

The first characters are the traditional complex forms of these characters, while the second ones are simplified but accepted as traditional ones, the most representative one is 台 (Tai2) used even on goverment buidings; 鉄 (Tie3) and 発 (Fa, Fa4) are often seen in Japanese and used on informal contex in Taiwan.

While 铁 (Tie3), 听 (Ting) and 发 (Fa, fa3) are considered strange simplifications of these characters (from PRC), many Taiwanese people doesn’t know these as simplified ones and would use the ones mentioned above instead