Hand-writing Chinese Addresses: The Cheater's Way 😜

Wow! Your dedication is very cool! It seems like you have a lot of fun doing so.

Like many here I don’t have a printer so I just write the addresses by hand. Sometimes I write (or rather copy) in Chinese and sometimes in English, it’ll depend how much space it’ll take - I always choose the one that seems “smaller”. This goes for Russian (but this one is often easier) and Japanese as well - once I was afraid if a card to Japan would arrive, but it did and the receiver was happy that I tried (and then I was also happy I tried).

Just as a fun note, a few days ago, after I had write-copy the entire address (it was long, or felt so) with a pencil (first I try with pencil and then pen) I realised it was the wrong card! I had drawn three addresses and had sorted out the cards and the first thing I write is always the address - although now I go for the stamp first, but I am rambling). So I struggled “do I just send this one or do I write all again twice on the other one?” I ended up writing all again because I thought the receiver would like the other better. It’s still in its way, I hope it gets there!

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Would be interesting if it was meant as ‘beginner’ and ‘uncommon’. Ah, language, semantics, communication.

When writing Cyrillic or Chinese, I either got comments like ‘decent’ and ‘cool that you took the effort’ or no comments at all. Nothing negative so far (hopefully b/c there is absolutely no reason to be negative)

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@PinkNoodle Your 10-step cheater’s tutorial is – and I mean this as a compliment – beyond extra. :star_struck: :star_struck: :star_struck:

Meanwhile, I’m sweating bullets when I have to write ß for German addresses. :rofl:

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If this ß is in Straße (Street) you can shorten it to Str. :wink:

I usually try to hand copy chinese address es by making the script on my phone very big.

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as @Jarana already wrote, there is no need to write “Straße” (even I never do it! I always use the abbreviation). If it’s in another word, you can just put ss instead. It’s a bit uncommon when writing in non-capitalised letters, but everyone will understand. If you don’t want it to look “noobish” just write the complete address in capital letters… there is no ß as capital letter (it will turn to “SS” then!)

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The person you quoted, I think, is from the US. The USPS requires an English translation of all international addresses if there is one:

“Addresses in Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Japanese, or Chinese characters must bear an interline translation in English of the addressee’s full legal name and complete address (including country). If the English translation is not known, the foreign language words must appear in Roman characters (either printed or script).”

I know it’s a pain in the butt to write the address twice or print it twice, but I do it anyway to increase the chances of it being delivered.

Edit: Ah, never mind my post. I thought you wrote Chinese was enough rather than English was enough. I think I need more coffee. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I used to be very “typewriter”-ish in writing non-Latin characters…until I had a Chinese pen pal. His handwriting was horrible! I looked at the return addresses he had on his letters to me and thought…how can anyone read this? It gave me the courage I needed to start relaxing when writing characters by hand and not worry too much if they aren’t schoolbook-perfect!

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Per @valdavid’s assessment, I am officially renaming this PinkNoodle’s 10-Step Method to Making a 2-Step Task Unnecessarily Complicated. :grin:

I applaud @yudi, @Regndroppar, @Stevyy, and others who took one look and said, Oh, hell no. :rofl:

@GJG, I do not write the English address in addition, but I also did not know about the USPS rules that @syaffolee mentioned. :grimacing: So far, everything has arrived in decent time, so…to be honest, unless my mail carrier knocks on my door to scold me, I think I will just keep using my weirdly-copied Hanzi, with the country name in Latin letters. (How do they expect me to fit two addresses on a postcard, anyway?!)

Funny that you mention this, because my friend (also a Postcrosser) and I have a running joke that we will make this kind of error and our cards will be mistakenly addressed to the Moon, where moon aliens will have amassed a stash of mysterious postcards from us. :full_moon:

NOOOOOOOOO. :sweat_smile: I can easily see myself doing this. At least you got more practice writing the address? :woman_shrugging: Anyway, I know the recipient will love it!

:cold_sweat:…um…I think I’ll just keep writing my wonky ß in that case.

Nice! One of these days, I will start practicing writing the characters freehand! (Probably in pencil first!)

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but why do you make it sound like that’s a bad thing. maybe they will start writing back :nerd_face:

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A bit off-topic, but…

There is now a capital ß! There was previously no need for such a thing, because there is no word that begins with ß. But because in many forms and also in advertising, etc. where one writes only in capital letters, since 29. June 2017 there is officially a capital (“big-written”) ß, at least in Germany (probably not in Switzerland or Austria, where the lovely ß has been pretty much abandoned…). It looks like this: ẞ. With a German keyboard I can generate it using [Shift]+[AltGr]+ß.

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Good News @PinkNoodle
Since 2017 capital ß is allowed and officail in the german orthography reform. Both forms ss and ß can be used in catipal letters.

The capital ẞ did not form part of official German orthography until June 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a rule that ẞ would be an option for capitalizing ß besides the previous capitalization as SS (i.e. variants STRASSE vs. STRAẞE would be accepted as equally valid).[14][15] Prior to this time, it was recommended to render ß as SS in allcaps except when there was ambiguity, in which case it should be rendered as SZ. The common example for such a case was IN MASZEN (in Maßen “in moderate amounts”) vs. IN MASSEN (in Massen “in massive amounts”), where the difference between the spelling in ß vs. ss could actually reverse the conveyed meaning.

Source Wikipedia

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Never too old to learn something new, thank you @ColorfulCourtney + @Jarana (the capital ß looks really weird though!)

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Yes, for typographic aspects I would rather stay with ss in capital letters.

Capitalising was a very common tool for advertising, but actually it’s absolutely reader unfriendly. Ok for headlines, but not in the middle of a text.

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You are just amazing! The effort you put into it… WOW! :star_struck:

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If you try Traditional Chinese.You will find it is the most hardest word to write.Like 中国 and 中國,龟and 龜(Turtle).Chinese is a hieroglyph.
@PinkNoodle

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Oh yessssss. If you thought Simplified Chinese was hard to write, you thought wrong. :sweat_smile:

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@aegisW, I just had to zoom in about a dozen times and put my face super close to my screen to see all the little details! :sweat_smile: Maybe I will write to someone living on Turtle Street sometime!

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Yea,lots of traditional chinese character are much complex than simplified chinese.
You can see the Turtle from oracle bone script to simplified chinese,You can find out the claw,head,shell and tail on it.The Chinese is much harder than other language to write is because it’s two dimension(consider as painting),not like Arab, Cyrillic, Latīn or Devanagari they all in one dimension.


@PinkNoodle

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Yes. I NEVER wrote the address in English if I wrote it in characters or Cyrillic. Things arrived and the USPS can get over it.

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I’m glad that you posted that picture, because I thought I was crazy for imagining that 龜 actually looks like a little turtle. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: :turtle:

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