Does it make sense?
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For anyone as slow as I am: the symbols in the matrix are all made of two hanzi each, by combining the individual hanzi from the vectors with each other.
Btw, this combining quality is said to be the reason why Chinese manufacturers tend to print awful-looking English (and other Western languages) on labels and in manuals: since hanzi are all monospace but can be smooshed to combine with each other, Chinese people don't really care about proportions in the characters. So they use their monospace hanzi fonts with weird monospace English characters in them, stretch or squeeze them as they see fit, and call it a day.
First of all it's just Chinese. Mandarin is one (Most common one) of several spoken dialects but they're all written with the same hanzi (symbols). At least, that's my understanding.
Second, as far as I can tell this really is a Chinese linear algebra joke. The left side is just the five elements of Chinese philosophy (Metal, wood, water, fire, soil), and the right side seems like it might be people's names? They're unintelligible enough to me that I assume they're names. But the names are constructed of hanzi that use the same radicals (Brush strokes) as the five elements, combined with each other according the the 2D matrix. I wish I knew what the names were but, I'm a beginner student.
The meanings of the characters in the matrix aren't part of the joke, just the radicals used in them.
I think that the elements in the final matrix are just the characters in the operands put next to each other (like in math we put a to signify a*b, they put 金 金 together to make up.. whatever is that character in row 1, column 1 of the final matrix.
On the left are the 5 classical Chinese elements. On the right are characters made by combining the elements, but they're mostly gibberish as far as I know.
It is unfortunate that the characters 鈥釷 are replaced by 钬钍, ruining the consistency.
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