Friday, November 13, 2009

Happiness is...

... that google maps now has tone marks for the pinyin on its maps of Taiwan! You have no idea how awesome this is.
See, it's extremely helpful if you say the tone correctly when you're asking for or giving directions, 'cause then the Chinese person understands what you're saying. But no maps ever include the tones in their Romanization, and neither do the street signs (if they even have romanization at all), so unless you know the characters (ahem), you're stuck. Usually you can figure things out as long as you pronounce the name of the road pretty well, but it's really nice to see the tone marks.

Yay!

3 comments:

KT said...

You are right - this is a very helpful improvement to google maps. Thanks for pointing out the change - now I'm off to see how badly I have been pronouncing things :)

dennis said...

nice feature, i can see how this is useful for the mandarin as a second language speakers

Chububobcat said...

I use Google Maps almost every other day, I noticed that they updated their lay over for the streets but didn't know that they had tone makes. This will make travel SOOO much easier.