New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

This is the first of another weekly feature I'm going to start. It is dedicated in name to New Concepty Cuisine, a local restaurant that is, sad to say, no more. The kids had wanted to eat there just because the name was funny, but we never got the chance. One day the sign was there, and the next day it wasn't. Two days after that, a big new sign went up for the 369 restaurant. One day after that, the 9 fell off the sign and landed in the parking lot. I don't know if anyone was hurt.

In any case, this weekly post will not be about shoddy construction, but about all of the weird garbled English we see around here. As I said once before, English is often used for decorative purposes only, and verification and proofreading of that English is irrelevant. I'm not mocking the Chinese too harshly for that, because it does go both ways. For example, I've been wearing a tie to work that has Chinese characters on it, and the Taiwanese kids tell me they don't make any sense. Fair enough. Nevertheless, even when the English here is supposed to be saying something real, it still often makes no sense.

For this feature, the ground rules are that I am only going to use photos that I or the family have taken. If you wan't to see a lot more of this sort of thing, I recommend http://www.engrish.com/. It is primarily centered on Japan, but it's got good laughs.

This is the ATM closest to our house. The machines work the same here, although sometimes the number pads are reversed. They always have an option to choose English, although sometimes they don't tell you in English how to chose English. A variation on that are the ones that require you to choose English before you put your card in. If you fail to do that, you are going to have to figure out in Chinese how to get your card back. Lee got caught by that one a few days ago, but she limped her way through the Chinese menus and successfully made the withdrawal. An additional quirk is that the button labeled "Correct" means go back and correct your request, not that you are correct and now you can move on. I can't get used to that, and I'm always cancelling my transactions halfway through.

However, when you finally figure out all the steps, you do get the sweet victory of having your Transaction Comleted.