CantoRead Blog

半斤八兩

Half a Catty Eight Taels

半 means half. 斤 is a unit of measurement, in English it’s known as a catty. 八 means eight and 兩 is another unit of measurement, in English it’s known as a tael. You could translate this quite literally into “Half a catty, eight taels”. Now the interesting part. Half a catty is equal

Posted by Angus Cheng Saturday, March 19, 2022

濕水炮仗 Wet Firecrackers

Back in the old days, firecrackers were exploded when opening new stores and during Chinese New Year. Afterwards water was splashed on the remains of the firecrackers to prevent any unexploded crackers exploding and possibly hurting someone. This phrase seems to have three different meanings. The first is “useless”, since wet firecrackers can’t explode, they ar

Posted by Angus Cheng Thursday, March 17, 2022

Weekly Update #3

Last week I did a whole bunch of iOS programming for CantoRead. The added the ability to group flash cards by the image they came from. It was quite a simple feature, but it took me ages to develop. I submitted it to Apple for certification last Friday and it was approved the same day. Nice. What’s the plan for this week? Content Marketing CantoRead has been available on the

Posted by Angus Cheng Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Handwritten Posters

Yesterday I was wandering around outside my house and noticed these handwritten posters pasted on the outside of a pet store. This looks pretty juicy! I don’t know a lot of the characters in the poster, so I used CantoRead to extract the text and create flash cards for it. The poster includes someone’s name and phone number which I’ve removed. 此人[NAME] 欠

Posted by Angus Cheng Friday, March 11, 2022

iOS finds Cantonese Swear Words Funny

Yesterday, at around 5 PM the Hong Kong government sent out a citywide alert. The government has never used the emergency alert system before. A lot of people were expecting bad news. Perhaps the citywide lockdown was starting? Maybe the government was going to send you to the newly made quarantine facility in Tsing Yi? Here’s what the message said. This really didn’t need to be an emergency alert. When

Posted by Angus Cheng Thursday, March 10, 2022