> > Are you of Asian origin? There are a lot of Chinese, Koreans etc in my city and 8 is a big good luck number with them; the more 8s the luckier the number.

My father is somewhat at a loss to explain why "Double 8's" and "Triple 8's" are considered to be lucky in Chinese culture. It's probably a specific word-similarity in one of the many Chinese dialects, the same as flying Bats are considered lucky because the word "bat" sounds like "luck" in Mandarin, I think. In Hong Kong the rights of ownership for a license plate with 8888 sells for millions of HK moolah.

Or maybe the Double-Lucky 8 has some great importance to do with Feng Shui. I don't know.


> > Some suburbs have stopped having a house number 4 on a street, similar to that thing about not having a 13th floor in some places, because apparently 4 is the death number. I would have thought 8 would therefore be doubly unlucky, but apparently not.
>
> Dunno about 8 or 4 within the Korean or Chinese culture, but I know the deal with the number 4 when it concerns the Japanese. "Shi" means death and also means "four" (which is why 4 is also said as "yon"). Additionaly, the number 7 can be pronounced "shichi" or "nana". From what I understand, it's not uncommon for something like a hospital to not have a fourth floor (though I have no first-hand experience). Just a consequence of having a language with way too many homonyms I suppose (seriously, in the back of my Kanji dictionary, there are roughly 80 different characters listed under "SHI").

Aren't the squarish Kanji characters related to Chinese text? Hiragana are the smooth rounded alphabet characters in Japanese. I always considered the Japanese to be lucky in that respect with their language.


> Ste "Boku wa gaijin desu yo!" phen

Okay, so don't keep us in suspense, man. Out with it!