Quote:
Originally Posted by Tsunami
I have never sent any letters to China or Japan or so, but I can imagine if the local alphabet is missing on the enveloppe, this may cause problems in tiny villages in rural areas where few people speak English (obviously this issue won't occur when the destination is a big city full of English speakers, eg Bejing or Tokio. But I've seen many documentaries of Chinese farming towns in remote areas, where nobody understood English. I assume letters going there need to contain the receiver's address in the locally used alphabet to avoid the letter getting lost?)
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It's not so much whether they know the English language as whether they can recognize the name of their own village and names of people written with Latin alphabets. Most people in developed countries can do this just fine, although some names can be ambiguous (e.g. same spelling but different tone). Also, especially in rural areas, postmen tend to be better educated than the average townsfolk. In addition, most addresses contain a lot of redundant information that facilitates finding the recipient: the name, the street address, the postal code, and even the phone number if you use a courier. Finally, most Westerners are terrible at "drawing" Chinese characters, so it might actually be easier for the postman to recognize the address if you just wrote it in the Latin alphabet. In any case, if there is any doubt about the legibility of your handwriting, use a computer and a printer. Never, ever use cursive script.