Here is a picture of a local grocery store called Yun Tian Mei Shi Fang. I can use the name to illustrate how difficult it is to read Chinese. I first used the pinyun (second column, the written pronunciation) to look up the Chinese characters on-line. But that only got me halfway there.
云 yún (classical) to say
天 tiān day; sky; heaven
美 měi America; beautiful
食 shí animal feed; eat; food
坊 fāng subdivision of a city
So then I combined the 5 Chinese characters and pasted it into Google Translate from Chinese to English, and that gets us a little closer :
云天美食坊 translates as ‘Sky Gourmet Food’ .. so maybe the translated store name is ‘Heavenly Gourmet Food’?
