@@radiobiologist Hahahaha this is surprisingly correct.

@@radiobiologist or that weird serif font that's probably the default when the Chinese font doesn't have Latin characters

the vibe really is 'single Chinese restaurant in a country town, its lace curtains and round window frozen in amber' huh

@@kreuner11 I'm pretty sure most Chinese fonts have Latin characters as it's a comparatively small addition when you're already making hundreds to thousands of glyphs anyways. Though I remember hearing that those aren't always great, especially in older fonts. So it might just be the Latin characters from whatever font is the default on Windows in China.

@@kreuner11 Actually when we are writting in English we just choose the typeface that were built for Latin characters, the situation you said only happens when writting in Chinese but there are just a little bit of Latin characters in the whole thing, and I think the weird Latin characters are just from some old typefaces like 宋体 and 楷体 The real situation I faced is when the whole article is in English, but there are some Chinese or Japenese characters, bacause Latin typefaces like Arial dosen't supports there characters, it will be replaced with a weird typeface just like what happend when writting Latin characters in 宋体 😂I need to replace those specific words with another typeface that supports that fits in. But yeah I cannot blame it, since Han Zi (include Japenese and Korean Kanzi) typefaces is a ENORMOUS work cuz each and every character is it's own thing (as can be seen in unicode, each character has its own code, it's near 100,000 codes for just Han Zi, and that database still haven't include all of it), at the point that most Chinese typeface also dosen't support all of it (the characters that are not supported are characters that are overly rarely used that 99% Chinese cannot even pronounce it, just like the 鹓 in my name lol (maybe we should make a game about pronouncing the rarely used Han Zi, that's definitely 99% people cannot pass😂😂😂)) Actually the work isn't "that heavy" as you though, a lot of Han Zi are combined by parts like stacking logo pieces, something like "pine+apple=pineapple"，“氵(water)+由(providing the pronounce)=油(oil)”, "钅(gold)+由(providing pronounce agian)=铀(Uranium)", "鼠(mouse)+由(yes, pronounce again)=鼬(Mustelidae). But still, the "parts" are still freakingly a lot so it's still HEAVY

It looks cool as hell though.

Not just that, the font itself reminds them the Chinese's stereotype.

"chop suey font is that nowadays it would be associated with "cheap" commercialized Asian food" I see what you mean. Cheap fast food, Chinese food made to the American taste buds. McDonald's in a different font. Still you gotta love it for what it is, that why it will always do well. It's just good, especially the buffet style. Best bang for the buck that's hard to refuse. Only place that beats it might be Mexican places where one plate is big enough for four people.

yes for sure

@@strawberries217 are you sure? 🌈

While recycling the same process of knowledge production in the same old Orientalist fashion

Assimilationist concessions

@@nehcooahnait7827 Exactly. I'm sick and tired of them recycling orientalist bs calling it cultural expression. I'd rather see full-western design without pretending to be something else.

Coming from a country that also has tons of weaponised diaspora in the West, all I hear is "You can be racist towards us, just change the regime already"

@@nehcooahnait7827 what does this even mean?

You don't even find those in European Chinese fast food / takeout places. Locally I've seen either disposable reusable Tupperware style plastic containers, the kind you can reheat in a microwave oven, or aluminium body, laminated cardboard top ones with the most generic branding on them, same as you'd get for fried chicken and fries in. I reuse the plastic ones, they are great for lunch prepping and storing in the fridge, since they stack nicely. The aluminium ones you'd think are the most environmentally conscious but they almost always end up in a landfill.

@@Fridelain I think I've seen them used here in Germany but it's been a few years since I last had Chinese so I might be misremembering it or they stopped doing it.

@@cameron7374 I have indeed seen them in Germany as well.

I live in Scotland with relatives in America and when I visited them one of the most exciting objects I spotted that lived in my cultural subcoincious were those oyster pails! I had the exact same feeling seeing something that had previously only existed in films and television!

@@JenSell1626 yt is racist

I never expected to see you here! I'm glad you have an appreciation for graphic design too!

I'd love to see a series on the "faux-ethnic" fonts. This video really peaked my interest!

Being a subscriber to medlife is probably one of the reasons KZfaq recommended this video to me lol

The cyrillic font is the one that really gets me tbh. Since every single faux cyrilic is a different level of faux cyrillic. Some of them are like 'Oh backwards Rs and some letters in a distinctly cyrilic style' but others are like, seemingly random letters substituted in a incomprehensible fashion. Like, if you're just making your R's Yas (The backwrds R is a ''ya' sound) its easy enough. But sometimes you see nearly every letter substituted, including ones that are identical to their english counterparts. I.E. Using a Д instead of an A, when the cyrillic A... is an A. Its not accented, its like a insane mishmash until nothing makes sense, often removing all latin characters and substituting various forms of cyrillic characters into an incoherent mess. I'm not sure when this started either, as the historical 'look its Russian' fonts usually just made your R's Яs and your W's Шs, but nothing as frankly bizarre as the modern ones.

I'd also like to learn more about faux-ethnic fonts. It would be so interesting to learn the history behind them.

hello, the god of video essays, nice to see you here

Agreed 😄

Absolutely. This is such great work

great to see you here Jacob

Makes sense to see you here

Chicken balls are also a typical Chinese dish in Ireland, I'm surprised to hear it exists in Canada

@Daniel Gallagher the world ain't ready for spicebags yet !

NJB! You are an inspiration to many, glad to see you here!

Taiwanese = more Chinese than China don't @ me

@@RayGwah I'm from the north and only heard of spice bag within the last few years when I moved to Enniskillen, probably cuz it closer to the boarder. Was funny to hear it talked about like a local delicacy "ye have to try spice bag" I was like wtf is that drugs?

At least most of the stuff were invented by actual immigrants, so it has that going for it at least.

Technically the most authentic food is raw meat but nobody is gonna eat that.

@@FelipeJaquez smoked meat is much more authentic, and anyone can do it. Just dangle some raw meat above a fire so the smoke makes it edible.

@@TheYeetedMeat but if you use wood from a tree that didn't exist in your area back in those days, is it still authentic? 🤔

@@adenkyramud5005 who says use wood? Smoke your hands as you hold the meat and eat them too!

If you don’t mind me asking, from a Chinese perspective, what are the popular fonts used to write in English within China?

I feel you.

@@Meimoons I mean I'm not a designer, but from my everyday experience we just use regular English fonts like Times New Roman, Calibri, Helvetica, etc.

THIS. this is so relatable, how many times have I searched 'font' for Chinese characters only for this font to pop up or another variant like this, it still nerves me until this day too.

Have you seen tattoo 功夫体

Yeah, as a Chinese American, Ilook at it and see it as integral to Chinese American history, warts and all. Ive grown quite fond of it and I hope it doesn't go away

i see your comments everywhere

I was born in Hong Kong and immigrated at age 5. Perhaps my perspective is different because I learned the basic strokes in Chinese. I'm pretty much Americanized now and illiterate in Chinese. But I find the "chop suey" font racist, derogatory and deeply offensive. I understand why past generations accept and even capitalize on it and I want the history of it maintained, but I don't want it to be used ever again.

@@dunnowy123 Honestly I assume it'll probably go away as newer Chinese migrants dislike it deeply, and frankly are likely to outpopulate and dominate the older culture of historical Chinese Americans. This happened with the pre-soviet Ukrainian Diaspora I'm part of, all of our cultural ideas and concepts that we held onto are having difficulty existing in the still-incoming crowd of post-soviets. Our language, fonts, cultural traditions etc are just kind of exterminated in the wave brought in. The anglicized 'Pepperivka' and kapusta-keilbasa give way to blin and vodka. Most of us migrated as peasants over a century ago, fleeing ethnic purges. Those now fled cultural collapse. There's little relation.

It also helps people who aren't as literate, bc you instantly look at the front before reading and know what type of food.

Almost every city in west texas has one of these places as well, a few from the 60's still survive

also in Mexico

It's beautiful, as are all the families that own those businesses. It's insulting to trash a diaspora's history, and pretend it's a noble pursuit.

West Virginia ha always been living 40 years in the past.

It stands out and shows that its authentic slav or Russian rather than some bland drink.

@@HamguyBacon alright then, but there's a letter D in vodka as well. Why not use cyrillic Д instead?

@@MultiMicals because its promoted to English readers.

It’s actually funny because Vodka in Russian is Водка… So to Americanize it it would look better as Vодка since this swaps the Cyrillic B for V, which both have the same sound. Sadly it only works in very few cases. I’ll see Яussiа or Яцssiа because you can’t really Americanize Россия. Same thing with anything containing an И. И in Russian is ‘and’ and makes a long e sound. If I say Ио I’m saying ‘eeyo’. Which sounds stupid. That’s what makes the fake fonts that use real characters pretty idiotic is that it makes no sense once you pick it apart.

As a native Russian speaker, reading these fonts feels like my brain is short-circuiting. Like, the Latin and Cyrillic characters mix in my head and it takes me a moment to figure out what I'm reading.

Don’t apologize for sharing information in detail that is so interesting!

“… and would have preferred the studio hire an actual Chinese actor to play the part (in a way less stereotypical way, of course)…” The character, Mr Yunioshi, was supposed to be Japanese so why would Rooney have preferred someone Chinese? _EDIT:_ I appreciate the edit of the comment. ☺️👍

@@jeff__w sorry, that was my mistake, I’ll fix it.

@@therealCrazyJake Oh, great. 👍🏻 Sorry, I didn't see your reply till just now. 😳

@@jeff__w you’re good, mate. KZfaq doesn’t notify me about replies, so I’m just now seeing your reply. Hope you are having a blessed day. 🙂

Ohh make sense

no wonder as a chinese (but i’m from singapore) i never knew about fortune cookies until i watched american movies & tv shows

You can still get them in Japan, but only in specific regions. It is no where near as popular here as it is in the US.

>Edo-period Of course

Do they still make it with miso and sesame?

祝你新年快乐!

Thanks

Lies lol

新年快乐~

great video as always

Oh, that’s definitely how it is in my area of America! The most authentic places in my region are exactly as you describe.

wdym a lot of baggage? im also in australia

@@lemonstrangler Personally it also conjures a lot of bad associations/memories of stuff like that stupid gong sound effect, that oriental riff, people making fun of Chinese accents or appearances, yellow peril, that sort of thing. Like Linus says in the video, its not necessarily that it is wholly racist in itself, just that it comes with and is a part of a larger racist history.

@@weiyin8046 oh thats true

@@mason4354 LOL no it's not like when I read about the White Australia Policy the oriental riff starts playing in my head, I guess it's similar to word association? It's really hard to explain in words. Like how sewing, thread, sewing machine, thimble, stitches, spindle, darning, embroidery are all different things but are in the same scope. Its the best way I can describe it, sorry! I'm not a sociologist so I don't have the jargon, but I find the study interesting :)

@@valentingartner3793 did you reply to the wrong comment or something? Because op didn't seem particularly upset.

@@valentingartner3793 What is your issue?

Hell yeah! I concur! Btw the stuff you make is amazing!

And just for how important it is, one unexpected example is, Doom Eternal, a game that sets in a hellish theme, would use what's considered a 综艺体 (reality show title font) in its Chinese localization, probably because they want something more stylish yet still look like 黑体 (black type, sans-serif equivelent for Chinese) to match the stylish font the original English text uses. Although it might look nothing wrong to non-Chinese readers, such font is actually considered "cute" in Chinese for its association with cute-sie reality shows and thus it became kinda a meme.

@@FlameRat_YehLon "actually considered "cute" in Chinese for its association with cute-sie reality shows and thus it became kinda a meme." Well Doom X Animal Crossing is a thing so it works. I wonder did that Isabelle and Doomguy meme spawn from the Chinese cute-sie meme?

I seem to recall, from past research into the topic, that the "theme park" tourist-drawing architecture for San Francisco's Chinatown, while crafted by non-Chinese talent (at a guess because Chinese weren't allowed to be registered as architects) was sought *by the community* during the rebuilding, to counter concerted efforts post-quake to forcibly relocate the Chinese out of the very central real estate they were on.

thank u for ur service

Thanks for your service! I read these scans SO MUCH growing up.

🫡 I remember the days of having quick scanlations followed by cleaned-up ones ½~2 weeks later.

Interesting that you brought up the Nazi era, because around that era a fake blackletter font became popular (fraktur grotesk).

@@oO_ox_O can you give me some examples please?

Some of the Mecedes-Benz posters deserve careful study.

Calls into question how natural that writing style was in the fictional movie, doesn't it? Do Japanese people actually naturally write in such a "Japanese handwriting" style when writing English letters? Or did they just do it in the movie because it looks cool?

The weird thing is that you take a movie as the basis for how a japanese person normally write in english.

@@EricChien95 I never said that.

@@EricChien95 he's not saying that - he's raising an interesting question about how native Japanese speakers write in English, and whether their handwriting has identifiable traits. And if so, how we can use that to design culturally-authentic Latin fonts.

I get what you’re saying, I work with a few ladies from Korea and when I look at their handwriting you can tell that they’re used to certain strokes and it reflects. Just like when I went to learn Japanese in highschool, my hiragana looked like crap at first because I was writing with my english tendencies and I totally neglected to consider the stroke order, lol.

That legibility applies in full only to readers who can't read the original script, in my experience. In some cases it's mostly fine (faux Greek is often Latinised enough that you don't really confuse the two), in others it makes reading quite a bit harder. Faux Cyrillic is particularly bad at this - it often uses actual Cyrillic characters (instead of "cyrillicised" Latin ones), like the Д in the video. And I always take a moment longer to parse the characters as Latin ones.

@@varana true, I was mainly thinking about the ones towards the right of the spectrum and the ones shown afterwards. I can see how using Σ as E, Д as A or א as X could be very confusing.

@@varana BTW, as a native German speaker, I sometimes see a related curiosity, when people not familiar with the German script use β or B instead of ß. Not as a font choice but as a character choice. Very confusing and hard to read.

It wouldn't be that hard. just replace all the circles with squares, and make it a smallcaps font, since Chinese doesn't have capital or lower case letters. For example, O can be played by 口, a Chinese character that means mouth. I study Japanese, not Chinese, so there's things I take for granted, like the character 〇 (circle, pronounced maru). 〇 is used to mean either blank space, or to write years, 二〇〇四 as 2004, for example. It'd be best to ask someone actually fluent in both languages.

imo the issue is, the designer didn't know how Chinese calligraphy work at all, there's no way to actually write the font with Chinese writing tools. some modern designs like Harukaze and Ninja Strike seems good enough, they considered the direction of the strokes.

Trivia: the Chinese character for 'old' (旧 Jiù) is formed by putting the number '1' in front of the character '日' ('day' in Chinese), to convey that the item you're referring to is already 1 day old

By contrast the video's creator thinks it's OK to disparage an aesthetic that has helped to build middle class Chinese families, to imply that they are wrong for finding a way to invoke their people's culture anywhere in the west to a western audience.

I literally facepalmed. While I'm not Chinese I've always known this font style wasn't developed by Chinese people. It's too different from Chinese writing plus I've known about the racism towards your culture for a while now. It just felt like white people coming up with white people things. Btw is that your art in your pfp? It's a really great style.

@@ZiddersRooFurry Uh totally not racist of you...

@@ZiddersRooFurry"...White people coming up with white people things." You mean like video, the internet and KZfaq?

Almost all food, goes through it as to change to adapt to whatever foreign land it isn't unique Chinese food. But get it's not authentic Chinese, it's Chinese American. And all the those restaurants have a separate menu for more "homemade, authentic Chinese food" but I do think they move away from making it a secret menu but that's just me (I'm not a Chinese American so can't speak)

Or, hear me out, Din Tai Fung might be from another country that don't use Pinyin 🇹🇼

Such a great blend of topics ❤️

That is the point of the video, to remove the distinctly Asian character of the diaspora. Ask yourself this, where else would Ming Dynasty style architecture be found, other than China? We can't have that in the west, so it must be called racist in a slick manner that says it's not calling it racist.

There is nothing wrong, racist, or backwards about celebrating the historical and cultural legacy of your people. There is nothing wrong about using aesthetics that evoke a particular culture.. yea maybe that one typeface is lazy, after a hundred years, but the concept behind it is not.

There is a really good Vox video about where "Chinatown architecture" came from. To put it simply, Chinese immigrants in America were heavily discriminated against in the late 1800's, and most lived in a small area in the center of San Francisco. The 1906 earthquake devastated San Francisco and destroyed most of the Chinese districts. This would have been the prefect opportunity for the city planning commission to move the "undesirable" Chinese community to the outskirts of the city. In response, wealthy Chinese businessmen and traders hired white contractors to rebuild their homes and businesses. They showed the contractors examples of traditional architecture from China, who incorporated them into the rebuild designs. By doing so, the "new" Chinatown with its' new pagodas and gates became an exotic "theme park" attraction in the middle of the city which generated a lot of revenue and tourism, so much that the city council decided to discard their initial plans to relocate the Chinese community. The new "Chinatown" architectural style caught on and was adopted by other Chinese immigrant communities around the world. In other words, the fake-pagoda style of Chinatown architecture was a decision made and endorsed by Chinese immigrants, who sadly needed to push this tacky stereotype of their culture to the white majority, to ensure their own survival and to pave the way for Chinese acceptance and equal rights for Chinese Americans.

The pagoda structure derives from that of the stupa, a hemispherical, domed, commemorative monument first constructed in ancient India. Initially, these structures symbolized sacred mountains, and they were used to house relics or remains of saints and kings. Source : Britannica "So much of Chinese Architecture".

You right, I just googled it and I have definitely seen it being used at Chinese shops

Not as small of a diagram as you may think

System Of a Down's "Chop Suey" has nothing to do with Chinese food.

i dont see this as racism, this is just for their business

@@lemonstrangler in its current form no its not racism but that could change very fast. Its just a stereotype right now but that can be weaponized

@@coby9179 I agree in general sense, but today when I see something like 'thank you for showing me potential racism in it' I only hope it's not for the use of another silly twitter drama...

@@blinski1 that is true if this came a cross a virtue signaling i did not mean it to do so. Im genuinely glad that his covered it and didnt just scoot around the topic. Ofc there could be said a lot more about racism and me saying: "yay you covered racism" isnt going to fix any problem about racism.

@@coby9179 Of course, and I want to point out it was not personal, and I hope you didn't take it as such;) Have a great day.

Exactly. My girlfriend, who's chinese, her family has run a Chinese restaurant / lounge for over 60 years that was started by her grandfather. The neon signs, the menus, all use Chop Suey. It's even used on the chopsticks where the name of the lounge is printed! She doesn't consider it a problem in the slightest and it's part of the culture of owning a Chinese restaurant in America.

I think you're entirely right about that, Filipino doesn't have enough distinguishing itself visually from English to be able to draw any meaningful comparisons and create something that would be recognisably "Filipino" to English speakers, the same way there isn't a "Spanish" font or a "French" font.

Unless eventually, our Baybayin script and its variants are brought up mainstream by the likes of Trese

I mean.. these are all authentic.. but it’s just the menus catered for western tongues.. ther eis no secret menu.. cause it’s all the same ingredients.. you just have to call those things by its chinese name 😂

Lol but it's not offensive.