
Chinese Number Websites - bpierre
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls
======
jamesli
Because digit numbers are not foreign to Chinese. As simple as that.

The majority of Chinese don't speak any western languages. A domain name of
letters is no different from a random combination of letters to them, even if
the name is composed of real words in English, Spanish, or French, etc. They
are completely foreign. While a combination of digits is not, like phone
numbers, zip codes, bus numbers, train numbers, etc. They deal with them
everyday.

My parents don't speak any other languages other than Mandarin. [To be
accurate, my mother spoke some Mongolian, and my father spoke a little
Russian, when they were young. But they couldn't speak any of them now.] They
have no problem in recognize and pronounce the 26 letter in English. After I
have been living in American for so many years, they still can't spell my home
address. They remember my phone numbers and my house numbers, though, but not
the street names. Think about it. It is amazing. Because I find it is much
easier to remember street names than phone numbers. Phone numbers are simply a
random combination of digits, except the area code.

~~~
arrrg
That makes complete sense. The number system is quite universal and global,
writing systems are not, or at least not to the same extent.

I would be lost if you asked me to type in a Cyrillic URL (and Cyrillic is
quite similar to Latin script, all things considered!), I wouldn’t even know
where to start if you asked me to type something from an even more different
writing system in.

I suppose English is on its way to gain some of the same universality as
Arabic numbers, but it’s still a far way away from that.

------
manifesto
One reason why Chinese have less difficulty remembering and using these
numbers than the western fellows might be the difference in pronunciation. In
Chinese, all single digit number has the same structure: a consonant plus a
vowel. For example, 7, in Chinese is pronounced as [ch-i:], while in English
is pronounced as [ˈsɛvən]. Also, every digit takes the same time to pronounce.
For example, a string "123456" is [yi:, er, san, si:, wu, liu]. That, in my
experience, makes a long string of number easier to read out. And easier to
read out means easier to memorize.

A side node: In China every kids in their elementary school if not
kindergarten can recite the "table of multiplication". That is, they can
remember the answer from 1 * 1 to 9 * 9. I doubt how many westerners can do
so, due to the language difference.

Edit: The asterisk symbol is driving me nut.

~~~
w1ntermute
Memorizing the times tables (up to 12·12) is standard in American schools.

~~~
raverbashing
Yup (but sometimes up to 10x10)

Of course, we would only need to memorize (10-x) items for the x table, except
1x anything, which is trivial

so, know 2x2, 2x3, 2x4, 2x5, 2x6, 2x7, 2x8, 2x9 from 3, you can begin at 3x3,
then 3x4, etc

to be more advanced you only need to know up to 5, and do the rest with
math... 9 _7? easy peasy. (5+4)_ (5+3) = 5 _5 + 5_ 3 + 4 _5 + 4_ 3 -> 25 + 15
+ 20 + 12 = 72

(there are other tricks you can do)

~~~
w1ntermute
Well, that's an example of the time-memory tradeoff, right? It takes a lot
longer to calculate 9·7 that way than it does if you've just memorized it. The
real question is where to draw the line with respect to diminishing returns on
memorizing products for larger and larger numbers.

~~~
vorg
> where to draw the line with respect to diminishing returns on memorizing
> products for larger and larger numbers

Everything from 2 * 2 to 9 * 9 where the second number is greater or equal to
the first, i.e. 36 combinations. But it would also be good to memorize sums
from 3 + 2 to 9 + 8 where the second number is less than the first, i.e.
another 28 combinations. So we'd need to memorize 64 combinations from 2,2 to
9,9 where we'd know whether the result is addition or multiplication from the
ordering of the numbers.

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dperfect
I'm surprised there's no mention here of punycode and IDNs. Is there just not
enough widespread support for IDNs (the article mentions a need for plugins,
but I thought most browsers already support IDNs), or are numbers really that
much easier to type and remember than short, meaningful domains in native
characters?

As I understand, punycode is translated by the browser to a standard ASCII
string, so there's no need for special support in the DNS system or other
infrastructure other than a simple translation in the browser's URL handling.
Seems like a pretty straightforward/simple solution.

~~~
zokier
While it doesn't mention punycode directly, it has paragraph referring to IDN:

 _Why don’t Chinese web addresses just use Mandarin characters? Because that’s
a pain, too. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN),
which sets the rules for web addresses globally, has periodically hyped the
expansion of domain names to include non-Latinate scripts, but Chinese web
sites have yet to take full advantage. Some devices require a special plug-in
to type in Chinese URLs, and even then it takes longer to type or write out
characters than to input a few digits. Plus, for web sites that want to expand
internationally but don’t want to alienate foreign audiences with unfamiliar
characters, numbers are a decent compromise_

~~~
dperfect
Sounds like the core problem is just "Chinese web sites have yet to take full
advantage".

I'm really wondering how many (or what percentage of) devices actually need "a
special plug-in". Seems like it would be a very small - and shrinking -
fraction, but I could be wrong.

If the user's device is (presumably) already set to use Mandarin (or any
specific language), then I assume that would be the default input method, so
why does that take significantly longer to use than numbers? I'm genuinely
curious, never having experienced that use case myself as a native english
speaker.

As for websites wanting to expand internationally and avoiding unfamiliar
characters, that doesn't really make sense to me - if they want to expand
internationally, I don't think the numeric domains are going to help much
(they'd be just as cryptic to me as Mandarin characters), so why wouldn't they
just register alternate domains in the target regions/languages as many
already do?

~~~
beemoe
>they'd be just as cryptic to me as Mandarin characters

Yes the meaning would be just as cryptic, but the act of typing and probably
memorization would be much easier. As an exercise, try downloading an input
method for a foreign character set and typing out a string that you see
rendered in an image.

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ytch
When talking about QQ, does anyone remember ICQ? QQ uses number as ID mainly
because it's a knockoff from ICQ at beginning

~~~
cynix
It was even called OICQ (OpenICQ) when they first started, even though there
was nothing "open" about their service.

~~~
myf
it also uses a penguin as the mascot...

------
opendomain
One of the more popular OpenDomains I have is 17m.com - auite a few people ask
to use it for a group buying site. This article helped me see the importance
of numbers, but when I looked it up on google translate but could not
understand what '17m' was supposed to mean. Can anyone tell me?

~~~
bebc
"17" prounces yiqi, in Chinese it sounds like "一起", "together",

"m" prounce like “买" "buy",

so "17m" means "shopping together".

------
jimbobimbo
I actually created an email alias for myself that looks like
5553423123@hotmail.com (555-... is my real phone number). My logic is:
whenever I need to say my email over the phone, it's much less error prone to
tell a string of numbers followed by the common domain name than spelling my
real (custom) name and domain name.

~~~
vorg
The phone has more to do in other ways with why digit urls in China than the
article mentions. Most Chinese internet users who are visiting websites use
their phone, and the 12-key digits pad is a lot easily to type into than the
30-key letters pad. The people who use netbars or home computers in China are
playing online games, not visiting websites.

------
yzhou
the point of using number in the domain is, a lot of Chinese people don't know
letters, they don't know English words and they can't get "PinYin"(using
letters to represent Chinese words) right. How do you make these people type
urls in the browser? well, luckily, they all know numbers!

~~~
khuey
Are there really computer-literate Mandarin speakers in China who don't know
pinyin? How do they input text? The only serious non-pinyin IMEs I'm aware of
are the bopomofo ones for traditional characters in Taiwan.

~~~
vorg
Mandarin speakers in some parts of China speak their Mandarin differently, so
can't remember the exact pinyin. E.g. around Wuhan people can't remember
whether a word ends with -ang or -an, similarly with -eng and -en. As a
foreigner, I can't remember nu and nv, similarly lu and lv. Beijingers have
trouble with -r endings.

------
w1ntermute
But why is this phenomenon restricted to China? I haven't observed it with,
for example, Japanese sites, even though they too use a non-Latin alphabet.

~~~
wodenokoto
There's a few things things that contribute to this:

Market powers in Japan chose early on to advertise their websites not through
URLs but through search keywords.

They will literally ask you in advertisement to enter certain phrases in a
search engine to let you find their web property.

Japanese internet usage is traditionally based around cellphones, which
traditionally were centered around portals. This is changing with smartphones.

Japanese numbers don't lend themselves as easily as Chinese to these double
meanings. Japanese words are quite long compared to Chinese ('wo', is Chinese
for 'I', the Japanese equivelant is 'watashi')

~~~
ezl
_> Japanese numbers don't lend themselves as easily as Chinese to these double
meanings. Japanese words are quite long compared to Chinese ('wo', is Chinese
for 'I', the Japanese equivelant is 'watashi')_

I think this is false. Japanese is quite rich for this. It's not worth
debating whether Chinese lends itself _more_ to this than Japanese, but as a
Chinese speaker (cantonese and mandarin) who speaks Japanese, I find that
Japanese is more versatile than Chinese.

Here's why:

1\. all the digits have multiple pronunciations.

2\. despite your point that many japanese words are monosyllabic, japanese are
notorious for shortening their words and maintaining the meaning and also
there are the chinese pronunciations ("on reading" vs "kun reading") so there
are often monosyllabic ways to pronounce it.

3\. additionally, for a given word, there are often tons of different
(seemingly sensible) ways to pronounce it. This is confusing to everyone,
including japanese nationals. they basically are just really good at figuring
out meanings. I often have no idea what the correct pronunciation of written
text is, but I know exactly what it means. This is true for japanese nationals
as well. here's a great video of a game where japanese people try to guess how
to pronounce kanji:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY63F5wIPzc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY63F5wIPzc)

Ultimately, the language's ability to be able to be used in the described way
depends on the ability to map the pronunciations of digits to other meaningful
words. Having a smaller set of sounds leads to more overlap.

Japanese and Chinese both have the property of having single syllable digit
names tons of single syllable words in the language to map to. (even though
arguably in Japanese "ichi" [1] or "nana" [7] are 2 syllables, "i"" or "na"
would be acceptable -- also, in Japanese "shi" and "yon" are both acceptable
single syllable ways to say the number 4)

Basically either is ripe for double entendre (not sexual, though possibly that
too... for example, in cantonese, you can pretty much say any number to mean
penis, though usually with the wrong tone)

(edit: I just wrote a longer detailed explanation of this with examples of
neumonics for square roots one comment level above this.)

~~~
wodenokoto
After reading this post and your other one, I stand corrected on my the last
point.

------
gbraad
"Why do Chinese websites use numbers in their domain names?"
[http://dashan.com/blog/culture/why-do-chinese-websites-
use-n...](http://dashan.com/blog/culture/why-do-chinese-websites-use-numbers-
in-their-domain-names/)

~~~
yebyen
Don't understand why you've been downvoted

This article even mentions Hindi-Arabic numbers, which is an interesting thing
to me as a student of the Arabic language

My teacher explained to us once, the numbers we use are called Arabic numbers,
but Arabs don't actually use them... they use Hindi numbers. ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠

Which is twice as funny as Arabs not actually using Arabic numbers, because
(he said) especially Muslims are very prejudiced against Hindi people and
Hindu religion. He would say things like "silly Hindu", then have a big belly
laugh and get back to serious classwork.

------
ddoolin
This phenomenon is also visible in Korea, except the way to navigate to
popular websites is to search Naver, Daum, or Google with the Korean name of
the website and then hit the top link. I found it very strange at first but
completely understandable given they typical just know the name of websites
via their names translated into Korean letters.

e.g. Facebook -> 페이스북 (페북); Pretty interesting.

------
mirkules
"Hotmail.com might as well be Cyrillic".

This is not a good comparison because Cyrillic (at least, the slavic version)
has almost a one-to-one relation to its latin counterparts. Russian Cyrillic
is a little more complex, with letter modifiers (like "soft sign" and "hard
sign") while in other flavors like Serbian Cyrillics, those characteristics
were built into the language.

Hotmail.com directly transliterated to Cyrillic would be: хотмаил.цом (h=х,
i=и, l=л, c=ц and the rest are the same).

~~~
zht
So how many Americans would be able to type хотмаил.цом?

~~~
mirkules
The point is that there is a direct transliteration available between cyrillic
and latin, and it's also not so culture-dependent as 617.cn is. You could
trivially automate that process too.

~~~
couchand
I thought the point was that it would be tough for an English speaker to find
and enter the characters if they were Cyrillic.

The transliteration only has to be done once when registering domains, so it
doesn't seem like much of a burden.

------
briandh
> In 2012, the United States refused to sign an international
> telecommunications treaty, supported by both Russia and China, that would
> shift the Internet away from its current U.S.-centric form of governance.

As the linked article expounds upon, this statement is strictly true but does
not give a very good picture of the situation. It was rejected on free speech
grounds, and not just by the US.

------
lifeisstillgood
So...DNS was a waste of time - we could have stuck with just typing in the
dotted quads :-)

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cpeterso
Wouldn't numbers also be faster to enter because you wouldn't need an IME?

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funkyy
Great article - I bookmarked it - when our startup will go online I will buy
associated number domain and redirect all Chinese traffic to it. I think
that's a great idea!

------
Kiro
Great article but I don't understand why the American friend refused to
communicate with people whose email addresses consist of numbers.

~~~
abrowne
Hope she doesn't want to text anyone.

~~~
epo
These days if you have them in your address book you can just start typing
their name and then pick from a list.

~~~
abrowne
True, but most so do most email clients, and this still would be breaking her
rule of "refus[ing] to communicate with anyone whose email address consisted
of a string of numbers".

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lotsofmangos
The comment about country codes at the end is interesting. Presumably it
should be something like .zg

------
tn13
I often see many rants on HN about US government and how it is becoming a
police state. However I think the fact that internet is US centric is better
than the internet where countries like Russia or China have have greater say.

------
autarch
1688 is not prounounced as "yoh-leeyoh-ba-ba". The 1 is pronounced as "ee".
This actually makes it closer to Alibaba.

~~~
ezl
Yao (pin yin first tone) is a common way to say "one" in northern china when
reciting multiple digits and basically the only way Beijing locals say 1 in a
phone number or a string of numbers. for going to a market and asking for 1 of
something, "yi" is the preferred way.

Pretty uncommon among southern Chinese people and Taiwanese (many American
mandarin speakers are of Taiwanese descent).

~~~
gurkendoktor
The Yao pronunciation was introduced to me as the "military" one in Taiwan.
Kind of like you would use "foxtrot" to spell out F on the phone.

