When Ryan Carpenter moved to Hong Kong seven years ago, his Cantonese was terrible. He said that in his effort to improve, he started by learning to read and pronounce signs and place names.
“Recently, it occurred to me that the MTR map would be a good way to collect all the names in one place,” Carpenter, who works in software, told Coconuts HK in a message.
The result is this awesome map of the MTR, which swaps Chinese station names with translations and English station names with transliterations.
Sheung Wan, for example, becomes “Upper District,” its literal Chinese translation, and Central becomes “Chung Wan,” which is how it’s pronounced in Cantonese.
This isn’t the first time Coconuts HK has seen his work before. In 2015, he created a different map — of travel times between MTR stations — that caught our eye.
“I enjoy maps,” he said. “It’s fun to think about new ways to look at places or data that no one else has considered yet.”
We look forward to seeing what Carpenter comes up with next. We’re betting it’ll be a lot better than what the MTR is actually putting out these days.
