Chinese Number Slang: What Do These Numbers Really Mean?

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322!

It makes me write at least 20 characters…thats hard with number slang.

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wow i would never figure out any of these by myself 233!!

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Yes Mandarin number chatting slang can be quite cryptic. They sound a bit similar when said out late but not very similar at all. 555
A bit like when they show you a character that a million years ago looked like something and now that character doesn’t look like that anymore at all and you are supposed to remember it. 233

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Very useful in the days we only had phones with keypads (my nokia only had numbers and english letters so …) and MSN was 666.

88

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555 I remember those days - I sat with my Nokia and Oxford Mandarin - English dictionary (the red one! Still the best dictionary I ever owned) at home trying to text in pinyin without tone marks.
I asked my flat mate to 995 me and he installed Chinese characters on my phone which was 666!
Spent many happy evenings sending text messages in Mandarin, including to people who couldnt speak Chinese. I just refused to write anything in English while studying. What was quite 233 sometimes.

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Found some Chinese number slang in a pretty unexpected place this week - Taipei’s Christmas lights! :laughing:

5201314 is Mandarin number slang for ‘I love you’, because 5201314 (wǔ èr líng yī sān yī sì) sounds like 我爱你一生一世 (Wǒ ài nǐ yī shēng yī shì), which means ‘I’ll love you for a lifetime’

Here was the light, I thought it was a cute Mandarin twist on a Western holiday! :point_down:

Love the fact you can decode this! To most of us that’s just a list of numbers.

I loved this post Riona made about number slang in Chinese.

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