Feeling Like in Shanghai - Our Very Poor Chinese Standard

I have a feeling like the first time I was in Shanghai - in a hotel restaurant having my breakfast. On the dinning table, there were these papers with descriptions of the restaurant. I was reading the English version and spotted a lot of spelling mistakes. I was telling myself, fortunately, we Singaporean are strong in both Chinese and English. This is our competitive advantage. It will take time for the mainland Chinese to catch out this advantage.

I have second thought now. We might be good - relatively good - in English, compare to the Chinese from China. However, our English is not so fantastic compare to the Westerner. And our Chinese standard is bad. Look at the banner displayed in Teck Glee shown here, can you spot any mistake?

Please allow me to zone in to the mistake in this photo:

Now this confirm my worry if you still could not spot the mistake. The first character here is wrong. 义气风发 should be 意气风发 instead! The meaning of 意气风发 is high-spirited and vigorous. 义 means righteous. 义气 means personal loyalty. You do not combine 义气 with 风发. I suspected that the writer tried to put the Chinese name of Teck Ghee (德义) as the first word of these couplet (对联). This is a very common practice. Either the writer has forgotten the 义气风发 should be 意气风发 and made this mistake. Or he hope that his readers do not know much about Chinese and could not spot this mistake.

Time to reconsider the standard of our Chinese education.