Help needed with a puzzle please!

[geocacher]

Hi,

I have a hobby called geocaching and there's a really hard one here with a puzzle which I think may be Chinese?

Any ideas?

[Weronika]

I just can tell you that this is chinese, you are right. But I'm not enough to translate it. Of yourse here are a lot of good-in-chinese, so they will.

[imron]

The chinese characters in themselves don't seem to make much sense when put together like this, and I don't think the first one is even a real character. Could it be that the codeword mentioned on the site you linked to is simply "Chinese"?

[geocacher]

Thanks Imron, just tried that but it didn't work.

[imron]

Also, it seems the first character is 麟 with the 夕 part erased

[imron]

oh, and in case you were wondering, 夕 means, sunset/evening

[Yuchi]

so:

麟暖啸二斑日 (lín nuǎn xiào èr bān rì)

Uh yeah...

[Joffrie]

As a Chinese, I may tell you that the "Puzzle" 麟暖啸二斑日 (lín nuǎn xiào bān rì), with the correct pronunciation, does not have any sense in Chinese. These six words do have its meanings repectively, but they are not a phrase or sentence.

麟 means big deer or Chinese unicorn

暖 warm

啸 to howl or bark

二 two

斑 spot or sparkle

日 sun

[889]

The comments on the puzzle page from those who've solved the thing all seem to suggest that the Chinese speakers they consulted weren't much help, that they finally solved it "in a moment of inspiration."

[trevelyan]

Perhaps the solution has something to do with the number of vertical and horizontal strokes in the characters. Or perhaps the character components need to be mapped to some sort of numeric equivalent.

This might explain why the first character has been modified. The 二 is vertically mispositioned, incidentally.

[imron]

I wonder if it's something to do with the missing 夕 in the 麟 character. Why else would it be blotted out?

[trien27]

For characters that don't make sense in Chinese, try to use Japanese or Korean pronounciation. Might help. If worse comes to worst, use Vietnamese pronounciation of the characters, which is rare.

[Lu]

I've seen this question (or one a lot like it) before, might have been more than a year ago, but you might try searching for it.