David on Formosa

Below are photos of a couple of interesting signs I saw while while in Tainan.

The above sign could perhaps best be described as Chinese with Japanese characteristics. The first two characters, inside the picture of the bomb, are 炸彈 (zhàdàn). However, the form of dàn is actually Kanji rather than the traditional (彈) or simplified (弹) Chinese character. The difference is quite small. The simplified Chinese has two dashes at the top of the character, the traditional Chinese two squares and the Kanji has three dashes.

The Japanese flavour of this sign extends a little further. The next part says 日式豚 (rìshì tún) meaning Japanese-style pork. The character 豚 is used for pig or pork in Japan, but in Taiwan and China 猪 (zhū) is the character used for pig or pork.

There are also two katakana following the characters. I am not sure what they say. Update: Thanks to Mark and Greta for their comments. 豚カツ (tonkatsu) means pork cutlet. See the Japanese wikipedia article for more details (if you can read Japanese) or see the English wikipedia article.

This sign is a good example of bad design. There are multiple problems here. The first is writing the English and pinyin sideways down the sign making it very difficult to read without tilting your head. It would be almost impossible to read while driving past in a car. Also the sign is visually cluttered. Reading some of the Chinese is difficult simply because it is too small, especially the 3公里 (3 kms) in red at the top and the 台江文史生態之旅 on the left hand side.

The other major problem with this sign is the strange combination of pinyin, English and Arabic numerals. There is also a spelling mistake in the English, gress instead of grass.

The first character of the sign, 四, has been written as 4 rather than written in pinyin as si. The next character, 草, has been written as grass (with a spelling mistake) rather than the pinyin cao. The next two characters, 大眾, are written in Tongyong Pinyin as Da Jhong. This is the only part that might be considered correct. The last character, 廟, is written as miao. While this is correct pinyin it would usually be translated to the English word temple.

The best way of writing the pinyin and English on this sign would be Sih Cao Da Jhong Temple (using Tongyong Pinyin) or Si Cao Da Zhong Temple (using Hanyu Pinyin).

NOTE: You can see higher resolution versions of these photos in my photo gallery. 4 Gress Da Jhong Miao and Bomb.

Also if I have made any mistakes or misinterpretations don’t be afraid to correct me in the comments.