Live from Beijing!

Once you spend some time surfing the Chinese Internet, you’ll quickly notice the heavy use of numbers in URLs.  This has of course been reported elsewhere, since it’s pretty hard to ignore.  But I haven’t seen anyone try to explain why this is so.

The closest I’ve seen is an explanation for the ubiquitous use of “51″ as the first two characters in a site’s URL.  The most famous example is the website called “51 job.com”, which is one of China’s leading “find a job websites”, similar to monster.com.  The reason why sites like this and others use “51″ is that when you say the word “51″ in Chinese, it sounds a little bit like the Chinese phrase for “I want”.  So whenever you see a site whose URL begins with “51″, you can bet that the site has something to do with wanting something, such as a job, a date, an apartment, etc.

This is a nice explanation, but it unfortunately doesn’t explain the preponderance of numbers for all sorts of other websites.  It would be nice to think that whenever you saw a number in a website you could simply ask what’s the Chinese homonym, but I’m afraid that approach won’t work.    

After asking a lot of people in hopes of unlocking the secret, I have finally concluded that there simply is no secret.  It’s pretty obvious: numbers are easier to remember and, importantly, much easier to type on a keyboard.  Let me explain both of these, since I doubt they are obvious if you don’t speak and write Chinese. 

In Chinese, there are ~50,000 unique written characters, but less than 500 unique sounds.  As a result, when you “hear” a character, it’s very difficult to know exactly which written character the speaker means.  In English, this occurs if someone says the word “stake”, and you hear the word “steak.”  In English, however, these cases are relatively infrequent, and it’s typically always easy to know which one is meant by the context.

In Chinese, it’s much harder.  In fact, almost every time you “spell” a word in Chinese, you need to quickly explain which character you mean.  Using the previous example, for instance, if you were telling someone to go to www.stake.com, you would need to quickly say “you know stake, like “stake through the heart”.  If that fails, you’ll see Chinese people hold out their palms and “write” the character with their forefinger.  No kidding.

[Parenthetically, this process happens every time someone tells you what his or her Chinese name is.  The first character is usually easy, since there are only about 300 acceptable Chinese family names (this for a population of 1.3 billion - notice the pattern here?).  The second and sometimes third characters, however, typically carry meanings that are meant to reflect the personality of the person (or at least the personality of the parents when they named their child).  For example, if you're sitting around a conference table, and as an icebreaker you ask everyone to introduce themselves, each person will invariably provide a small story that explains which exact characters comprise their name.  The polite thing to do is remark about how clever their parents were in choosing those particular characters.  But back to the main story.]

Given all of this, the appeal of using numbers in URLs is very strong.  First, when you use a number, there is no ambiguity about which number you mean.  Although there are many characters that have the same sounds as the characters for numbers, once you make it clear that you’re talking about numbers, there is absolutely no ambiguity.  Second (and I think this one is the real kicker) numbers require a single keystroke on the keyboard. 

In contrast, each Chinese character requires at least three and up to 10 keystrokes.  For one Chinese character.  A word (which is made up of 2-3 characters) therefore typically requires 10- 20 keystrokes. So in English, you might type “see dog run” (11 keystrokes).  In Chinese, the same sentence could easily require twice as many keystrokes.

Let me explain.  When I first worked in China for IBM in 1982, the modern method of writing Chinese with a Western keyboard had not yet been invented.  As a result, we sold computers with massive keyboards.  You needed special training to use them, since they had all sorts of complex overlays.  As I recall, very few people could ever master the system.

This all changed when the modern method for inputting Chinese on a Western keyboard was invented (I don’t know exactly who did this and when it occurred, so please let me know if you do).  Here’s how it works: you type the way the characters sounds, using a romanization method referred to as “pinyin.”  As soon as you type in something the computer recognizes, it looks up all of the characters that have that sound, displaying them in a little pop-up interface.  If you’re lucky, the character you are looking for is displayed within the first menu (which is typically seven or eight characters at a time).  However, you often have to scroll through several pop-up menus before you find the character you want.  Once you find that character, you have to click on it or type in the number that’s next to it.

Believe it or not, Chinese people go through this process for “each” character they write in every single document they type.  As a result, typing in Chinese is slow.

So hopefully it’s now easy to understand the appeal of numbers.  They are right there on your keyboard, typically at the top or in a separate keypad.  Typing a number requires one, simple key stroke.  There is no ambiguity, no list of similar sounding characters to choose from, and you can type very fast.

So while I assume there are many other explanations for why numbers are so popular inside the Chinese Internet (no doubt going back thousands of years and referencing all sorts of cultural contexts) I think the most compelling reason is the simplest.  It’s just easier.