I used http://www.chinese-tools.com/ to see what 'James' looked like in Chinese characters.
Someone wrote my name in Chinese characters the other day. I don't know how reliable this is (compare it to the characters given previously) - I didn't know chinese characters could be used phonetically - I thought each represented a 'concept'. I will need to investigate further. I came across a book yesterday in Chinese characters about Mary Queen of Scots. So I picked one page at random - which happened to have an old illustration of Glagow Cathedral and asked a woman what the picture caption said. She knew Chinese but didn't know these characters (which presumably said things such as 'Glasgow' and 'Cathedral' ) because she had never seen them before. Makes you think Chinese written characters are fine for 'concepts' you already know - but pretty useless for 'new' things. Must be a pretty inefficient way of passing on new information - maybe that was the idea when it was invented ? - a monopoly of knowledge for the Mandarins running the country ?????
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