Chinese people who prefer digital URLs

An American girl who lived in Beijing said she would never listen to emails with digital addresses, such as 62718298454@163.com. When I heard her say that, I thought she had a point. It even left me speechless-why do we have to make an e-mail address like a number that's so hard to remember? But after I banned digital communication, I cut off contact with all the Chinese I know .

If you are in the United States, then you need to really remember long numbers as long as two: your phone number and your Social Security card number. But in China, you have to remember the QQ number, email address, and even the address of each website. And the Chinese people like to do with the number of domain names, such as the original site of Jingdong 360buy.com, is later changed to a simpler JD.com, if you think it is still not good to remember, then directly enter 3.cn can also. And 4399 is China's largest online gaming site, second-hand car site is 92.com, buy train tickets website is 12306.

Chinese Why have such a preference for numbers?

This is largely related to memory patterns. English users memorize words more easily than memory numbers, but for many Chinese the numbers are easier to remember than the Latin alphabet. Although Chinese children learn phonetic systems from a young age, most people are more familiar with numbers, especially those who have not been to college. hotmail.com This domain name for many Chinese people and difficult to understand the ancient Cyrillic alphabet.

The numbers on Chinese web sites are not randomly chosen.

Numbers represent different meanings, video site 6.cn 6 of Chinese pronunciation close to "flow", the number 5 pronunciation close to "I", the number 1 pronunciation close to "to", 51job.com pronunciation sounds like "I want to work." There are also McDonald's takeout websites 4008-517-517.com,517 in Chinese that are like "I want to eat".

The digital language has the infinite change, also became the Chinese website user's Shorthand Magic Weapon: 1 is wants, 2 is the love, 4 is dead/IS, 5 is I, 7 is the wife/eats, 8 is sends/not, 9 is long/wine. 5201314 is I love you for life, 0748 means "You go to die", 687 means sorry, 250 is an idiot, 38 is a prostitute. Chinese people also like to take a lot of 8 mobile phone number, and preferably without 4.

Why is China not simply using Chinese characters as a Web site?

It's all about pain. The Internet name and digital address distribution agency, or ICANN, is the body that rules the global web site. ICANN regularly promotes the use of the non-Latin text domain name, but many Chinese websites have not fully exploited it. For some devices, the input of Chinese characters requires special equipment, even if the ability to enter Chinese characters, compared to the Chinese character input, the number of input time is less time-consuming. Moreover, for websites with a global outlook, they do not want foreign users to be confronted with characters they don't understand, while numbers are decent concessions.

The direction of numbers/letters can be seen as a radical cure for the internet bias: even today, 20 years after the birth of the Internet, it is still a set of American systems. Although the United States recently agreed to hand over ICANN to a global multi-stakeholder organization in 2015, ICANN is still an American non-profit group. ASCII, the alphabet coding system that most Web sites use is actually an abbreviation for the American Standard Code for Information interchange (Anglo Standard Codes for information interchange). In 2012 the United States refused to sign an international telecommunication treaty with the support of Russia and China, which meant moving the core of the Internet's management from the US. In other words, from WiFi to GPs, the internet structure has been a reminder that the US still holds the digital hegemony of the Internet.

Although China has its own top-level domain name, cn, but. cn, after all, is not Chinese, and those who want to say 250 to Americans, or 0748 of countries, you can not blame.