A CROSSING LANGUAGES

Normally, in the English system, it just contains alphabets and sometimes with numbers. Also, in the English system, there is limitation to limit how people write, it means for example, when people write the date, they can only either write the year “2018” or “two thousand and eighteen” but not “two thousand and 18”.

In traditional Chinese system, it is totally different, it is allowed that people can write in different format, using "2018" as the example again, the original writing of 2018 in traditional official writing characters should be “二零一八 ”. However, the character "零" has too  many strokes in the character “零” so people started to write “ 〇 ” to replace the previous one, it is just a wider version of “0” so that it looks parallel with other characters. The sound of “〇” is same as “零”, therefore, people won't get confuse even though used a different word.