Learn Chines Online

My favorite chatboard has some interesting advertisements that I usually ignore. But one kept popping up that got me curious. It says, in simple black and white, "Learn Chines Online." After a dozen or so exposures to this I began ruminating and then investigated further.

My first thought was that 'chines' is an instrument. Something like 'chimes' but with a new-age or some kind of ethnic twist. I wondered what 'chines' might look like and how they sounded and WHY in the world I'd never heard of them.

Then I thought "chines" was a card game or a fortune-telling game. You deal the cards and placed them a certain way and then read the official "chines guide" and told fortunes. I thought about the kind of pictures such cards would have. Would reading "chines" resemble reading Tarot? Or the I-Ching? I wondered where the "chines" cards came from. Did someone just make that up or was there a legitimate history that traces back to some ancient Afghan tribe that sequestered a certain and prized group of women who could read the "chines" only after special indoctrination that included smoke, ashes, celibacy, and some dead animal.

But alas, no. This ad promises that you can learn CHINESE online. Yep, an entire pictograph language ONLINE in no time. Forget the fact that Chinese is a tonal language that most westerners can only BEGIN to understand after long periods of intense study - locked in a basement in Beijing, no doubt.

So this is some money-making venture, I am sure, by somebody who purports to teach Chinese but can't spell it. I guess that as long as they pay their bills, we can continue speculating on the chatboard about the true meaning of learning "chines" online. You gotta wonder though - on a teachers' chatboard some advertiser is getting away with spelling an entire language wrong, and nobody has mentioned it.