Englisg Carnival - Helping Foreigners in Taiwan?

Discussion Open Forum
1

I love speaking Englisg!
:unamused:

2

Ah, that was at 101, last year…

‘Foreigners can also climb YU Shan on their owns!’

3

Heh - I just called, asking them how I can make sense of Taipei City’s “Nicknumbering” system. :stuck_out_tongue: Of course she didn’t know what I was talking about. I described it a little more, and she began to realize what I was asking about. She suggested I contact the Ministry of Transportation. I asked her if all foreigners who wanted to utilize this system designed for their convenience had to contact the Ministry of Transportation first, and if so, that isn’t very convenient, is it? She promised to get back to me this afternoon. I’ll keep you posted. :sunglasses:


Street sign of babel
Taipei Mayor Ma Yingjiu displays a new road sign in English. Signs with what the government hopes are easy-to-remember names have been given to Taipei’s main streets to help foreigners.

4

The lady called back! She tried to explain the “system” to me, but admitted that it was not a very intuitive system.

5

Why did they spell it ‘ZhongSiao’? I thought they’d settled on 'ZhongXiao.

Anyway, the International Community Service hotline is run by the Foreign Affairs Police. Last year they had a public meeting to discuss the fact that nobody uses the service, and apparently I was the only person to hear about it. I went along and listened to a presentation about all the ways they get the word about - including ads at forumosa!

I called Gus, from the meeting, and he confirmed he’d never heard of them, which didn’t go down too well when I raised my hand and challenged the guy in charge.

They’re obviously trying harder now, albeit ineffectually.

The [url=http://tw.forumosa.com/t/what-a-fancy-taiwan/33046/1 Taiwan[/url] thing is another of their ‘services’. As far as I can tell, it’s an attempt to make foreigners click on some part of their site, so that they can report all the hits and show how successful they’ve been.

Interestingly, at the afore-mentioned meeting, the man in charge stated that their interpretation of the law was that volunteering to proof-read or rewrite the Chinglish in their website would not be considered illegal. In that case, they should team up with forumosa to take advantage of all the help and advice offered here in some way.

Why not call it the ‘Forumosa helpline’?

6

The picture is 6 years old. :sunglasses:

7

So many good ideas killed by the utter and complete half-assed Taiwanese approach. :unamused:

8

This old photo shows a remnant of an early version of Tongyong Pinyin, which Chen Shui-bian started instituting toward the end of his term as mayor. So after Chen’s administration started using this, the guy behind Tongyong changed the system, removing zh- and substituting it with jh-. This also had the effect of making obsolete a lot of the signs that had gone up just a few months before. Just more of our tax dollars at work. :unamused:

Note, too, that the friggin’ InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion was started under Chen, though Ma Ying-jeou is the one who really ran with that one.