Reading Chinese is Easy – Part II

Chinese Sign Optical Illusion
Chinese Sign Optical Illusion

As I have promised yesterday, new day – new optical illusion! Can you read this Chinese sign on your left? Sure you can! A little self-confidence and some flexing of the muscles in your neck, should do the trick. No additional hints further!

I took some time and added “Symbol” tag to some previous optical illusions that in their nature are similar to this one. If you follow the link, you may find few more “Chinese” illusions there. This should help you further identify the optical illusion used in this sample.

If you didn’t notice, the title of this post contains “Part II” – You guessed, there is Part I as well.

BTW I’ve heard some positive suggestions from you guys. For example: how I should disable the picture from showing its filename, or disable the tags below each post (sometimes they spoil the puzzle). As eager I may be to do that, I’m still not sure if this would be possible. Sure, its easy to remove the tags or simply name the image “xgzgf” or something, but all these tags are necessary for SEO (Google search engine). Seems I’ll have to find another way of masking those…

110 Replies to “Reading Chinese is Easy – Part II”

  1. China! Oh, this is really fun :D

    Hey, I have a suggestion. Why not give us 4 to 5 days to solve your puzzle? Later on, you’ll announce (via comment) that you had already tagged your posts.

    Am I first? Hope I am! :D

  2. oh yea, forgot to mention that i know a little chinese, and the english word found in the image means excaclty wat the chinese word means

    sorry if thats a bit confusing XD

  3. That’s actually really neat. I can read Chinese, so I see both 中國 and China in it!
    Although it’s using simplified Chinese, so it’s read as 中国。

  4. Cool!! Very interesting, similar to one that told us to “get back to work”… I think it was supposed to be Arabic.

  5. phew took some twisting – fortunately my screen can be picked up and moved around, saving my neck muscles. “The East is Red!” – or am I revealing myself as a (very) old lefty

  6. Hmmm… I’m Chinese and that says “zhong guo”, which means “China” or, literally, “Middle Country”, but no matter how I look at this, nothing’s clicking… :o Maybe because I already know what it really means?

  7. This illusion actually says china in chinese lettering(from top to bottom) as opposed to the previous “chinese” illusions

  8. Nice. Arabic letters can be made like this, too. I wonder if you had some of those. Russians, too. I’ve seen a poster pasted on a wall facing a mirror in a public toilet. If you read the poster, it seems to be foreign words in Russian (cyrillic? Excuse my ignorance here) letters. But when you read the poster through the reflection in the mirror, it’s actually latin letters in English language.

  9. Hello all!. Cut in the middle and the message appear.Don’t understand noting coz it’s for english peaple…

  10. Cool one! It’s China in Mandarin vertically down and China in English it’s it’s flipped on one side. More!

  11. Oh I totally see it now. I didnt get it til I saw part 1. If you tilt your head to the left you can see it clearly :)

  12. Haha, nice pun on the “on your left”. I like the double meaning of it, meaning China in Chinese AND in English! Nice illusion. ^^

  13. that actually looks similar to a chinese symbol…lol but the trick behind it is quite fascinating….

  14. Just tilt your head to the left, and “China” appears… actually, those ARE Chinese characters: 中国 (zong guo), which means, well, “China” in Chinese o_0″ But, that little “v” part in the “N” kind of ruins it… the original characters not supposed to have that. Great illusion though, cool!

  15. Scott; you are right, that resembles no chinese character.
    iT’s just a ploy for foreigners, a kind of a special font.

    Emma, you fell for it.

    ed, see scott’s comment

  16. It says China in both English and Chinese. From the side it says “China”, but up down those are the chinese charecters for China.

  17. To hide the tags without having them disappear from your code (and thus still indexable by Google), add the following line into your CSS:

    span.tags { display:none; }

    Hope that helps!

  18. it is two chinese words on top of the other zhong guo.it is chinese for china.p.s i am a true chinese

  19. It’s both. ‘China’ in English. It’s also ‘中国’ which means China. I love this, it’s awesome!

  20. it says china in english,but this is not a chinese character,an does not mean anything written this way

  21. As a matter of fact, it is a Chinese character. Well, to be precise, it’s two Chinese characters. reading vertically, the words say 中国, which in Chinese, mean China!

  22. For everyone who is wondering what the actual characters are, it says “zhong guo” or China (literally “middle country”)

  23. I’m Chinese and the words are pronounced zhong(1) guo(2), which means “China”, but literally meaning “centre country”. It was a little weird because this word “国” doesn’t have the letter “N”. Good effort though.

  24. My neighbor/Friend Japanese and has some knowledge of Chinese she says it wrote badly on purpose to accommodate for C H I N A been seen in English, Is this true?

  25. cool it’s 中国 or middle country, cuz they in the middle of their world.

    oh, it’s mandarin chinese word for china.

  26. dudes who think tht’s not a chinese character:
    it is!!! it’s china, in madarin…oh and if u think the guo is rong…tht’s cuz its simplified! nobody uses traditional anymore(well, actually lots of ppl still do…let’s just say i’m rite!)

  27. poke Anonymous A.: traditional Chinese FTW~!!!!!!!!! traditional is so much prettier and meaningful~~ I refuse to be assimilated! HK + Taiwan still uses traditional =)

    I’m genetically Chinese, born + raised in Hong Kong, then went to a church filled with people from mainland China who use simplified Chinese… I can attest that, read vertically right side up, that is in fact simplified Chinese saying “China”, with a funny squiggle on top of the 2nd character to accommodate for the N =)

    took me so long to see this one because I thought it was just “artistic” Chinese =P But nicely done ^___^

  28. like Emma said and very right, reads in both ways China, top character Zhong(centre) and the bottom one guo(country)but not really sure if it’s that correct and that translates to China..

    keep up!! :D

  29. @ duhh

    You are right, that is how to write “china” in Mandarin, but when you look at your comment sideways, (to the left) you see something similar to the picture. The illusion is modified so it would say “china” sideways, as well. Everyone who says It’s Mandarin for “china” is right…

  30. There is no way that this album says China. You don’t tilt your head, nor do you read the white part, you have to adjust your eyes to see the black part, the white parts are the spaces as in when you write bubble letters, theres always blank spots. If you squint your eyes it is easier. Took me 1.5 minutes to see the word. It says: Oceansize

  31. I like it! Oh and even though almost everyone else said it it says China it may be hard at first but it is eeasy after a while.

  32. That’s creepy. Zhong(1) guo(2) means China and when you tilt ur head ninety degrees to the left you can read China. I’m living in HK so I know a few things about Chinese characters. Awesome!!

  33. I learn the traditional chareacters in Hong Kong because they still use them. But at school they teach us both simplified and traditional. Confusing…

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