I came across mail.yeah.net, from a Chinese Internet provider, and thought I’d try out their free email service, and see how that would work out.
The sign up form was full of Chinese characters, naturally, still I could type in my name, fill in the password, date of birth etc. But after about 10 fields or so, I got to this section:
Screenshot from the yeah.net sign up form
Now I was kind of stuck. I went to Google / Translate and and pasted in the label, and clicked the “Translate” button:
Screen shot from Google Translate
Please type in the characters above! — a CAPTCHA field — of course! Now I was definitely stuck, and gave up! (I don’t know Chinese characters, nor do I know how to produce them with my keyboard)
I’ve been putting CAPTCHAs on some websites myself, to keep out spam and abuse; see
My friends tell me often that they don’t like it when they have to tackle those CAPTCHAs (this is why I thought of the CAPTCHA for the stephansmap sign up form: it is supposed to entertain, as far as my entertainment talents go in terms of computer graphics.) But it definitely stops the spammers.
So with yeah.net I got to see this all from a different perspective.
It can be done by a non-speaker of Chinese who knows how to work a Chinese dictionary. This is non-trivial, but a lot easier than learning Chinese. Has to do with learining how to count the strokes in the character, and how to at least distinguish about 40 “radicals”.
With that, you can get a prononciation which you could look up in an on-line dictionary to get an encoded character.
I expect it would take me 20 minutes or so for your two characters.
I could show you sometime, if you like.
Comment by Steve White — December 14, 2009 @ 2:47 pm