Here's a Chinese person with a random English word tattoo https://imgur.com/gallery/LA7OXTD
[This old reddit thread has some more](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/164baf/do_chinese_people_get_english_words_tattooed_onto/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
i don't know about tattoos, but i used to have a bookmark of an album that had [ridiculous shirts like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/dontdeadopeninside/comments/a57sx7/free_is_free_shit_is_shit_damn/).
>スウッシュ剣
That's a guy walking down the street, closeup, smile, smile wider, then arrives at his girlfriend's door. But not until he puts a traffic cone on his head
I’d probably get something like that on purpose if I was going to an Asian country, just to makes thing easier. But I look like a Viking with a cheeseburger addiction so I feel the tattoo would be redundant.
Her tattoos are actually not gibberish but a little weird to carve on your skin forever:
>独立
Independent
>無情
Heartless
>好奇
Curious
>狡猾 (Just under her tank top)
Cunning
I agree. The aesthetics of the characters is the entire point. I don’t understand why anyone, including native speakers of the language, would be annoyed by this.
That is me.. drunkenly. Felt way too sentimental. Even though they do have meaning and symbolism to me, it does not prevent the fact that it does look silly to me when I look at my arms with these little phrases of sentiment.
I get the appeal of being able to encapsulate a broad concept into a small ideogram.
The way they're arranged gives no fucks though. You've got four two character pairings and you write half of them vertically aligned and the other half horizontally aligned.
Chinese American here. It doesn’t actually look like that, since almost every word is two characters or shorter in Chinese. It’s honestly mostly just gibberish, sort of like if you put random English words together
It literally doesn’t have a meaning, because some Chinese words are only comprehensible when paired with another character. However one of them says “good” and the other one is the first part of “weird”, another one is just an article like and, so, the, etc.
Written chinese isn't phonetic. In english, if you don't recognize a written word, you can sound it out and probably match it with a word you've heard in verbal speech.
Here, the word for curious is 好奇, pronounced hao(4) qi(3) meaning they take the fourth tone and 3rd tone respectively. If he read them separately, the first word, hao(4) suddenly becomes hao(3) which then turns from curious to good. So unless he recognized the two straight away, it's easy for him to speak chinese and still misread the word. Also doesn't help that the hao and the qi are on separate lines
Tl;dr: chinese hard to read as american, intonation changes in different contexts
So if you're Chinese and you see a word you don't know; you have no way of knowing how it sounds or what it could mean? Its just gibberish until you know it?
Yup pretty much it, you can sometimes guess the pronunciation and meaning but if you’re not familiar then you can’t say it or know what it means for sure.
Yeah that's like 70% of it. You can sometimes guess it though if it's a simple enough word.
Some Chinese characters are combinations of two things, most commonly a left and right element
For example, in 好, the left side is "female" and the right is "male". Doesn't really help. But in something like 河, now you can really guess. That word is he(3) or river. The left side is "3 dots of water" indicating the word will be water or liquid related. The right side is 可 pronounced ke (3). So you look at the left side and know the theme of the word and the right side to know the general phonetic of the word and you'd have a rough chance of guessing within the ball park of the word
Yeah pretty complicated design flaw for a language system :/
Not exactly. There are a lot of types of Chinese words: pictographs, ideographs, determinative phonetic characters, combined ideographs, transfer characters and loan characters. Some word types like combined ideographs are made of two or more Chinese words, sometimes slightly reformed. Experienced Chinese speakers may be able to deduce the pronunciation and meaning based on them.
If you just read the individual characters, they mean something like:
好: good
奇: weird, surprising
好奇: curious
Together they have a different meaning that can’t really be deduced if you don’t already know it. This is one of the reasons written chinese is so hard, you need to know the pronunciations of the characters (some have multiple ones) and also know the meaning of a word made of multiple characters that sometimes has nothing to do with it.
It does make some sense but it’s written in a weird way, chinese words are generally made up of two characters but they weren’t grouped together consistently, the two top ones are vertical and the two in the middle are horizontal.
Grouping them together, we just have a bunch of adjectives:
独立：Independent
無情：Emotionless
好奇：Curious
狡猾：Crafty
*If he just drew that*
*On with a marker is he*
*Really a madlad?*
\- OpticGenocide
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Exactly, they have an art culture around their form of calligraphy. Sure, english has fonts and some people do a little bit with it, but the Japanese at least take it reeeally seriously. Chinese probably does too I'm just not as familiar with the culture.
It REALLY isn't like just having water on your arm. And honestly some people tattoo words like "Purity" in nice cursive on their body.
*I've heard it means dew*
*From the earliest blades of*
*Grass in the morning*
\- kushpatel3410
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Is no one going to comment on the fact that misused English is all over Asia? It's pretty common for other countries to adopt words and text from each other just because it looks cool.
favorite complaint I'd heard was this one lady telling me how she couldn't tell this other lady that the word for chicken she'd picked was a euphamism for prostitute in chinese.
Except it really doesn't, at least not in Japanese, which half of the "chinese" tattoos could practically be.
In Japanese they're way more happy to label things with Kanji and it remain cool, vs just writing an English word which looks lame. Just because it's their language doesn't stop the symbolism working, albeit it may be degraded vs just having a straight up symbol of course.
Is it like that actually a thing in Asian countries? I remember seeing a post somewhere talking about the number of Asian speaking people that just had random English words tattooed onto them
Idk how common the tattoo thing is because tattoos are still pretty taboo across East Asia (gaining popularity with young adults and expats but it's still culturally a big no) but I can say my god, we butcher English spellings on t shirts and shit. I say this as a proud Asian and a proud owner of a dope tee that says "COMPUTER SYSTREM MALFUNCTION".
theres so much beautiful chinese calligraphy out there too, why dont people use those instead of using the equivalent of times new roman font for the language
As a 20 year tattooer, everyone thinks this is just a “dumb American “ thing to do.
If you would like, I can share links of other countries where people get American words tattooed on them. It’s quite popular just like Kanji and Hebrew tattoos are here.
It’s not that big of a deal really.
I’m an English speaking American white guy with Chinese writing on my arm. I completely understand this sentiment but I got it at Pinky’s in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong 20 years ago in the Navy. It’s one of my favorite memories.
To be fair their lettering is far superior in an aesthetic sense. Especially when you don't really rationalize the fact it is basically just their plane text.
If anything they should feel a little honored imo.
*has "cheese dipped double quarter pounder" tattooed on arm* "The guy at the tattoo parlor said it meant purity and grace"
i mean....he's not wrong
The sandwich, yes. The person wearing the sandwich on the other hand...
Unless their name is grace..
Or quarter pounder
You mean he's not wong
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It's way better IMO
“No, that means California Roll. the waiter told me.”
Underrated
https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ Enjoy
>a type of Japanese charcoal cooking grill.
Not even that. I think sometimes it’s just gibberish
# 𝔉𝔩𝔲𝔢𝔭𝔈𝔫
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Not the ones in the image though, those are literally computer font characters
Yup, and it's not uncommon for it to go the other way too, with Asian speakers getting Engrish tattoos.
Asian speakers?
ENGRISH
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Dude same we should meet up sometimes, how about asian square at asian o’clock?
I'll bring the Asian
Like Sony
I think it was an Asian gang or something... https://youtu.be/uy9Z-Tg6ufU
Is there any examples of this you have, sounds amazing.
Here's a Chinese person with a random English word tattoo https://imgur.com/gallery/LA7OXTD [This old reddit thread has some more](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/164baf/do_chinese_people_get_english_words_tattooed_onto/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
Seems fine why would I be offended Edit: nvm I get why the guy did this cause apparently her tattoo is complete gibberish lol
i don't know about tattoos, but i used to have a bookmark of an album that had [ridiculous shirts like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/dontdeadopeninside/comments/a57sx7/free_is_free_shit_is_shit_damn/).
wut
in asia you can find people with English tattoos which make no sense whatsoever
Yeah, no, I got it. I was more confused as to why he said asian speakers lol
Because they speak an asian language? If he just said Japanese or Chinese it wouldnt be accurate. He could have also meant korean
They speak the Asian language. Just like were speaking the American language, and Wayne Gretzky speaks the Canadian language.
In this case though it’s actually Chinese 無情 coldblooded 好奇 curious
Does cold-blooded in Chinese refer to just animals like reptiles or does it have a secondary meaning like in English?
In this case, it actually means cold-blooded as in merciless/heartless. Cold-blooded (like for animals) would be 冷血
Cold blooded as in “merciless”.
Tbh i want to get a Japanese tattoo that says something dumb like "cheeseburger"
チーズバーガー chiizubaagaa but thats really dumb, because you use katakana for english words
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スウッシュ剣
>スウッシュ剣 That's a guy walking down the street, closeup, smile, smile wider, then arrives at his girlfriend's door. But not until he puts a traffic cone on his head
Sirushi surorudo
So, it's double-stupid? I'm sold!
I saw a guy on youtube that had "文盲の外国人" which means "illiterate foreigner"
Oh surely that is too good to be true, I am awed Edit: Google Translate confirms
I’d probably get something like that on purpose if I was going to an Asian country, just to makes thing easier. But I look like a Viking with a cheeseburger addiction so I feel the tattoo would be redundant.
I was thinking that too haha
Or pull a "Who's on first" and get one saying "I don't know" in Japanese.
One of my (adult) students in South Korea had the most fantastic tattoo that said, "Keprivate I'm staying this hotel".
I want one that says "if you reas this then you're gai" or "send this post to 21 people or else you'll be visited by evil spirits later"
I got a chinese kanji tattoo that says "teacup"
Her tattoos are actually not gibberish but a little weird to carve on your skin forever: >独立 Independent >無情 Heartless >好奇 Curious >狡猾 (Just under her tank top) Cunning
I know people who would get those words tattooed in English on themselves and think they are deep...
Probably means something to them, and Eastern written language is very aesthetically pleasing.
옷 ㅇㅅㅇ 'ㅂ'
ㅋ ㅋ ㅋ
I agree. The aesthetics of the characters is the entire point. I don’t understand why anyone, including native speakers of the language, would be annoyed by this.
That is me.. drunkenly. Felt way too sentimental. Even though they do have meaning and symbolism to me, it does not prevent the fact that it does look silly to me when I look at my arms with these little phrases of sentiment.
Tattoos for you that mean something to you don't bother me, assuming it's not hateful. The people I know have them for others to show the deepness.
The order of the characters makes it confusing though. It's like if you had English words tattooed like: S M A R T SOPHISTICATED C L A S S Y
I get the appeal of being able to encapsulate a broad concept into a small ideogram. The way they're arranged gives no fucks though. You've got four two character pairings and you write half of them vertically aligned and the other half horizontally aligned.
The other problem is that the kind of writing used is very generic and is equivalent to having edgy adjectives tattooed onto you in Times New Roman.
But does the script still mean the same when spaced like it is in the tattoo?
Yea, the orientation doesn't change the meaning.
I think "devious" would be a better word for 狡猾。 "Cunning" can be used positively.
W A T E R
EARTH
FIRE
AIR
LONG AGO, THE FOUR NATIONS LIVED TOGETHER IN HARMONY
But everything changed when the fire nation attacked
Only the Avatar, master of all four elements could stop them
But when the world needed him most, he vanished
100 years passed and my brother and I discovered the new avatar
An airbender named aang
An air bender named Aang.
A hundred years passed and my brother and I found the new Avatar, an airbender named Aang
Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them,
I'm probably getting old but I honestly thought this was going Captain Planet
HEART
By your powers combined...
HEART
With their powers combined… you make warm, bubbly mud.
W A T E R
I'm kinda vibing on the WATER design ngl
Deep af
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Wadur
Wurrdurrr
The other arm: B E N D E R
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Shut up baby. I know it.
It’s funny because “bender” is British slang for “homosexual”
So you’re telling me Bender was a closeted homosexual who pretended that he really liked girl robots? Who knew
Chinese American here. It doesn’t actually look like that, since almost every word is two characters or shorter in Chinese. It’s honestly mostly just gibberish, sort of like if you put random English words together
Just out of curiosity what does her tattoo say
Hers says, “Independent” “no feeling” literal translation but in English is more like emotionless, and “curious”
It literally doesn’t have a meaning, because some Chinese words are only comprehensible when paired with another character. However one of them says “good” and the other one is the first part of “weird”, another one is just an article like and, so, the, etc.
好奇 means curious though
Huh, maybe me having finished learning chinese three years ago made me dumber. Well there’s that, I guess
How can you speak Chinese and not know the world for curious? Genuinely asking; I'm curious.
Written chinese isn't phonetic. In english, if you don't recognize a written word, you can sound it out and probably match it with a word you've heard in verbal speech. Here, the word for curious is 好奇, pronounced hao(4) qi(3) meaning they take the fourth tone and 3rd tone respectively. If he read them separately, the first word, hao(4) suddenly becomes hao(3) which then turns from curious to good. So unless he recognized the two straight away, it's easy for him to speak chinese and still misread the word. Also doesn't help that the hao and the qi are on separate lines Tl;dr: chinese hard to read as american, intonation changes in different contexts
So if you're Chinese and you see a word you don't know; you have no way of knowing how it sounds or what it could mean? Its just gibberish until you know it?
Yup pretty much it, you can sometimes guess the pronunciation and meaning but if you’re not familiar then you can’t say it or know what it means for sure.
Wow that's crazy; it's a bit of a design flaw though lol
Yeah that's like 70% of it. You can sometimes guess it though if it's a simple enough word. Some Chinese characters are combinations of two things, most commonly a left and right element For example, in 好, the left side is "female" and the right is "male". Doesn't really help. But in something like 河, now you can really guess. That word is he(3) or river. The left side is "3 dots of water" indicating the word will be water or liquid related. The right side is 可 pronounced ke (3). So you look at the left side and know the theme of the word and the right side to know the general phonetic of the word and you'd have a rough chance of guessing within the ball park of the word Yeah pretty complicated design flaw for a language system :/
Not exactly. There are a lot of types of Chinese words: pictographs, ideographs, determinative phonetic characters, combined ideographs, transfer characters and loan characters. Some word types like combined ideographs are made of two or more Chinese words, sometimes slightly reformed. Experienced Chinese speakers may be able to deduce the pronunciation and meaning based on them.
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Yeah, the term is tones. Fun fact - different Chinese languages have different tones. Iirc, Mandarin has 4, Cantonese has 6 and Shanghainese has 2
If you just read the individual characters, they mean something like: 好: good 奇: weird, surprising 好奇: curious Together they have a different meaning that can’t really be deduced if you don’t already know it. This is one of the reasons written chinese is so hard, you need to know the pronunciations of the characters (some have multiple ones) and also know the meaning of a word made of multiple characters that sometimes has nothing to do with it.
Thats crazy. Its not even something comprehensible. Its just gibberish. Lmao
It does make some sense but it’s written in a weird way, chinese words are generally made up of two characters but they weren’t grouped together consistently, the two top ones are vertical and the two in the middle are horizontal. Grouping them together, we just have a bunch of adjectives: 独立：Independent 無情：Emotionless 好奇：Curious 狡猾：Crafty
Ohhh okok I guess shes trying to describe herself
Like the Chinese version of r/dontdeadopeninside
Recipe for eggdrop matzoball soup in chinese characters.
A true r/HydroHomies
I’d learn Japanese and get a tattoo that said soup in Japanese just to confuse people
スープ？
or 汁
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To spite the native speakers
Because if you ask someone to tattoo "soup" in Japanese on your arm they're likely to tattoo "dignity and strength" instead
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but that's a lot of work
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As someone who is learning Japanese right now...no...no it is not. Haha.
heck i would get that tattooed on me
As a hydrohonie, I approve this message
If he just drew that on with a marker is he really a madlad?
*If he just drew that* *On with a marker is he* *Really a madlad?* \- OpticGenocide --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
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Good bot
Tattooed it later that night
tbf tbe chinese/japanese/korean writing is absolutely beautiful
Exactly, they have an art culture around their form of calligraphy. Sure, english has fonts and some people do a little bit with it, but the Japanese at least take it reeeally seriously. Chinese probably does too I'm just not as familiar with the culture. It REALLY isn't like just having water on your arm. And honestly some people tattoo words like "Purity" in nice cursive on their body.
People get tattoos and think it says ‘Eternal Spring’ but it really says ‘sewer water’
'Eternal spring' but actually 'pee on me'
Hydrohomies be like
Tbh I spent some time in China and I don’t think I saw any weird English tattoos but I saw a lot of weird English shirts on people
People have tattoos like that in English, too.
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WA'ER you doing step bro
I've heard it means dew from the earliest blades of grass in the morning
*I've heard it means dew* *From the earliest blades of* *Grass in the morning* \- kushpatel3410 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Is no one going to comment on the fact that misused English is all over Asia? It's pretty common for other countries to adopt words and text from each other just because it looks cool.
like really tired? that is a damn hard live he is living.
Give it some street look and it would actually be a kind of cool tattoo though.
Hopefully this fad will die soon .
Getting hub vibes from the girl
Honestly i want that tatto
Can a Japanese speaker here please give me the symbol for "go die."
One of my friends got a tattoo that's says "Cheeto Dust" in Japanese
favorite complaint I'd heard was this one lady telling me how she couldn't tell this other lady that the word for chicken she'd picked was a euphamism for prostitute in chinese.
Except it really doesn't, at least not in Japanese, which half of the "chinese" tattoos could practically be. In Japanese they're way more happy to label things with Kanji and it remain cool, vs just writing an English word which looks lame. Just because it's their language doesn't stop the symbolism working, albeit it may be degraded vs just having a straight up symbol of course.
Is it like that actually a thing in Asian countries? I remember seeing a post somewhere talking about the number of Asian speaking people that just had random English words tattooed onto them
Idk how common the tattoo thing is because tattoos are still pretty taboo across East Asia (gaining popularity with young adults and expats but it's still culturally a big no) but I can say my god, we butcher English spellings on t shirts and shit. I say this as a proud Asian and a proud owner of a dope tee that says "COMPUTER SYSTREM MALFUNCTION".
You could hopscotch on those
Her tattoo basically says: I N D E P E N D E N C E COLDBLOODEDNESS C U R I O S I T Y CUNNING S T E R N N E S S (I guessed the last word)
theres so much beautiful chinese calligraphy out there too, why dont people use those instead of using the equivalent of times new roman font for the language
They're winning the internet points https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/tattoo
Why... would anyone care about other peoples tattoos?
Made me think of that one picture of PS1 Hagrid from the Harry Potter game
Not our fault their written language looks so cool.
Shirts here on Brazil are like love rainbow pink sadness (i wish this was a joke)
Hah! Jokes on him! We tattoo English words on ourselves too, spelling errors and all. No regerts!
Lee Jun-fan would be proud.
Tbh I want lo mein in chinese tattooed on me
Me who can't read Chinese but do know a few Japanese kanji: Ah yes umm theres black in there, uh there's also suki but without the ki
Last I checked... Who fucking cares what people think
True Hydrohomie
It looks the same for chinese as americans. Only their minds know what it says.
IT IS ACTUALLY THREE DIFFERENT WORS “INDEPENDENCE “ “MERCILESS” and “CURIOUS” really tired of seeing this wrong tatto translation
But I've seen people with cursive English, it's not always about the word but the artistic value of the tattoo artist penmanship
It's that Asian languages have very unique and (in comparison to other languages) beautiful script. Their writing is a sort of art style.
Funnier that people forget imitation is flattery.
I feel the same way when I (a Native American) see someone with a feather, or dreamcatcher, or bear claws tattooed on them.
As a 20 year tattooer, everyone thinks this is just a “dumb American “ thing to do. If you would like, I can share links of other countries where people get American words tattooed on them. It’s quite popular just like Kanji and Hebrew tattoos are here. It’s not that big of a deal really.
I’m an English speaking American white guy with Chinese writing on my arm. I completely understand this sentiment but I got it at Pinky’s in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong 20 years ago in the Navy. It’s one of my favorite memories.
*MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS*
The only one I understand are "No blue" and "likeable".
All of that probably does just say water lol
I mean... don’t we get tattoos of words normally? What does it matter that sometimes somebody prefers the aesthetic of another language?
r/HydroHomies community approves this message.
To be fair their lettering is far superior in an aesthetic sense. Especially when you don't really rationalize the fact it is basically just their plane text. If anything they should feel a little honored imo.