it says "baka gaijin"

(click on the little dots above for the link)

I heard about that site (hanzismatter.com) on NPR last night - it's like the equivalent of Engrish.com for Asian characters. Mostly, it's people who have gotten tattoos of mis-written or poorly-worded phrases in hanzi or kanji. I'm flabbergasted. Like the owner of the site says, why would you get a tattoo in a language you don't understand? Or if you do get the tattoo, why wouldn't you first verify it with someone who actually knows the language? It's a tattoo, fer chrissake. It's permanent! At least most of the mistakes on Engrish.com are on t-shirts or signs, not branded forever into someone's skin.

Sheesh.

So, inspired by that site, I went a-googling and found a bunch of neat links for information on characters.

• .gif files of many common Chinese characters, searchable by English definition, from about.com. They give the simplified characters, tho', which are standard in mainland China, but which I don't really like very much because most of them are ugly (more on this in a sec).


• the 3000 most common characters, in order of frequency. This guy also has knitting charts for some characters!


• Chinese surnames and links to resources for researching your genealogy in China (which I would totally love to do someday).


• a searchable online Chinese dictionary - way bitchin', especially how they deconstruct the characters (like giving an etymology for the words). Also, they show both the traditional and simplified characters, so bonus points for them.


• the ugly boy tattoo story, as linked from hanzismatter.com. On the one hand, this is kind of sad... but on the other hand, it still makes me giggle (I am so going to hell for that. Hee.). I particularly enjoy the sidebar to the article, featuring key phrases to avoid if getting character tattoos.


• Unihan, the universal code for displaying characters online.


• shirts from jlist.com - if you want shirts with "wacky" phrases on them written (correctly) in Japanese. I want the reverse version of the "Beware of Perverts" shirt (size XL, if you're feeling generous), tho' the "Death from Overwork" shirt (size M) and the "Expel the Foreign Barbarians" hoodie (size M) are pretty funny, too. Actually, there's a ton of great stuff in the jlist.com store. I've been meaning to drop a chunk of change there for ages.

So if you're wondering, here's what my Chinese name looks like (character images snatched from zhongwen.com):
This is my mom's surname. The simplified version is in parentheses. See why I don't like the simplified characters? They don't make the damnedest bit of sense, half the time. How did they get that square & cross thing from the character on the left? The simplified version is just ugly. And anyway, no one would use the simplified character to write their name.
This is the name my grandparents (mom's 'rents) gave me. They picked it to sort of sound like my English name, but not be an exact phonetic translation (the standard version of which, "ee lee za bai," just sounds ugly to me). It means "beautiful coral" ("li" from "mei li," meaning "beautiful," and "shan" from "shan hu," meaning "coral"). "Li" is a fairly common character (in fact, while I was doing that semester in Singapore, I noticed they used that "li" as part of the translation for "Ally McBeal" in the Chinese subtitles for that show on Singaporean TV), and while I'm no fan of the simplified version of it, I will admit that that one is a whole heck of a lot easier to write than the traditional version. "Shan" is pretty obscure, however, and I remember one long exchange between my mom and a Chinese calligraphy artist where she was trying to explain which character it actually was so he could do a painting (writing? script? what is the noun I want, here?) of my name.

If I were ever to get a character tattoo, it might be my name (in part so I could always remember how to write it - which makes me sound like a retard, but that "li" is really tough to write, dammit). If not that, then I'd have my mom and her siblings and my friend Julia (and maybe even Julia's parents) all proof my phrasing and characters first. And I'd watch the tattoo artist like a hawk to make sure he or she did not screw the thing up. I mean, really.