Bad Characters

Nissan’s Bluebird (sedan) is translated as Lan-Niao in Chinese. In Mandarin, lan means blue and niao means bird-no problem. However, the reading of the characters for lan niao in the Minnan (Hokkien-Taiwanese) is lan jiao, which also sounds like the word for male genitals. It’s rather complicated, but although blue in Minnan is lan and bird is jiao, the term lan jiao is bad, to put it mildly.

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