Shop & Road Signs

Long before you can read a newspaper, you can read the street — and Chinese public signs are their own compact grammar. They drop subjects, skip verbs, and reach for a terse, written 书面语 (shūmiànyǔ) register that no one uses in conversation. This page collects about a dozen genuine, standardized signs you'll meet at every door, shop, and roadside in China, and decodes the sign-grammar behind them: the prohibition words 禁止 / 请勿, the warning frame 小心, the "in progress" suffix 中, and the extreme compression that lets two characters do a whole sentence's work.

Doors and directions

The first signs you need are on the doors themselves. 入口 and 出口 are a matched pair — 入 "enter" + 口 "opening," 出 "exit" + 口. Note that 出口 also means "export" in trade contexts; on a door it's simply "exit."

On glass doors, the classic one-character pair tells you which way to move it: 推 "push," 拉 "pull." Getting these two backwards is a rite of passage.

Open, closed, in progress — the 中 suffix

Shops post whether they're trading. 营业 is "do business," and the suffix 中 (zhōng) turns it into "in the middle of / in progress": 营业中 "open (for business now)." The same 中 gives 休息中 "on break" and 施工中 "under construction."

Warnings — the 小心 frame

Hazard signs open with 小心 (xiǎoxīn, "be careful / mind"), followed by the danger. 小心地滑 warns of a slippery floor: 地 (dì) is "floor/ground" and 滑 (huá) is "slippery." (Machine translators infamously render this "Slip carefully" by misreading 地 as the adverbial particle de — but here 地 is the noun dì, "floor.")

Prohibitions — 禁止, 请勿, and classical residue

This is where sign-register really shows. Spoken Chinese forbids things with 别 (bié) "don't." Signs almost never use 别 — they use the written 禁止 (jìnzhǐ, "prohibited") or the polite-formal 请勿 (qǐng wù, "please refrain from"), where 勿 (wù) is a classical "do not."

Shopping — the discount trap

Sale signs use 折 (zhé, "discount"), and the number is what you pay, not what you save. 八折 means "pay 80%" — that is, 20% off. 全场 (quánchǎng) means "everything / the whole store."

Grammar in this text

Compression: dropped subjects and verbs

Signs are maximally telegraphic. 入口 is a bare noun; 推 is a bare verb; 禁止吸烟 has no subject ("[it is] prohibited [to] smoke"). This mirrors news-headline style and rides on Chinese's general tolerance for dropping recoverable subjects. A full sentence like 这里是入口 ("this is the entrance") would be correct but absurdly wordy for a sign.

The prohibition ladder: 别 → 请勿 → 禁止

The same "don't" comes in registers. Spoken 别 (bié) (别抽烟 "don't smoke") never appears on formal signage; instead you get polite-formal 请勿 or blunt-official 禁止. This is a textbook case of the spoken vs written register split: 别 for people, 请勿/禁止 for the public notice.

The imperative behind 小心

小心 + noun is a compressed command: "watch out for X." It's a bare imperative with the subject ("you") understood — the same structure as English "Mind the gap." No 你, no verb of warning, just the alert word plus the hazard.

中 as an "in-progress" marker

The suffix 中 (zhōng) in 营业中, 施工中, 休息中 sits in the same family as the localizers (上, 下, 里, 中) but here reads temporally — "in the middle of doing X." It's how a sign says "…is currently happening" in one character.

Classical residue: 勿 and 免

勿 (wù, "do not") and 免 (miǎn, "need not / exempt") are classical Chinese survivors that live on precisely in this formal-sign register. They compress and elevate — 请勿 is terser and more official-sounding than a spoken 请不要, and 闲人免进 packs "unauthorized persons need not enter" into four characters. You won't say 勿 in conversation, but you must recognize it on signs.

Vocabulary

Common Mistakes

1. Reading 八折 as "80% off." The number in 打折 is what you pay. 八折 = pay 80% = 20% off; the smaller the number, the deeper the cut.

2. Putting spoken 别 on a formal sign. 别 is conversational; a posted notice wants 请勿 or 禁止.

3. Negating a prohibition with plain 不. 不吸烟 is a statement ("[I] don't smoke"), not a ban. A prohibition needs 禁止 / 请勿 / 勿.

4. Writing a sign as a full sentence. Signs compress; a grammatical full sentence reads as clumsy signage.

Key Takeaways

• Sign Chinese is telegraphic: bare nouns (入口), bare verbs (推), no subjects (禁止吸烟).
• Prohibition has a register ladder: spoken 别, formal-polite 请勿, blunt-official 禁止 — signs use the latter two.
• 小心 + hazard is a compressed imperative ("mind the…"); 中 marks "in progress" (营业中, 施工中).
• 勿 and 免 are classical survivors that live on in formal signs — recognize, don't speak, them.
• In 打折 the number is what you pay: 八折 = 20% off, 五折 = half price. Smaller number, bigger discount.