Hey guys - Taffy, Goose Egg and I want to create some giveaway cards to promote Taiwanease.com, and we’d like to have essential Mandarin phrases on one side. (The other side of course would promote Taiwanease more explicitly through logo/artwork, etc.)
We’d like to have the characters (traditional, of course), the meaning in English, and the Hanyu Pinyin phonetics. My initial thought is to not use tone marks with the phrases, as they are meaningless to anyone who doesn’t have experience with the language, the very people we’re targetting with these cards, but if you have a strong argument in favour of including tone marks, I’d like to hear it.
What we really need are the phrases you think a new arrival needs to know, no matter what their demographic. They could be tourists, visiting business people, FOB teachers, whatever. They could even be themed: Hotel Mandarin, Nightlife Mandarin, socializing Mandarin, taxi Mandarin, restaurant Mandarin, etc. The cards aren’t very big - the size of a standard business card - so we can’t put more than two or three phrases on a card without making it look too cluttered, so keep that in mind when you’re coming up with them.
PS humorous replies will probably be floundered sooner rather than later - we’d like to get this up and running fairly quickly. Bu hao yi se