It says “hot surface do not touch” in full, actually. Braille uses single characters to represent some common letter combinations (“touch” is “t” + “ou” + “ch”). The words “do” and “not” are each contracted to a single letter (“d” and “n” respectively).
Well, you can learn actual basic braille in like 15 minutes. The only important thing missing in it is ⠼ that denotes that following symbol is a a number. E.g. ⠁⠃⠉ is “abc” but ⠼⠁⠃⠉ is 123.
A neat trick is that it translates mostly phonetically across languages so, when traveling, you can get some idea and even practice a bit of reading of the local script by reading braille signs in elevators and buses. It is surprisingly difficult to find photos of those signs on the internet, even though they are literally everywhere, but, for example, this sign reads as KNOPKA V?ZOVA PERSONALA in braille, so you can infer that “КНОПКА” reads as “knopka” and not “khonka”, or that З thing is not a number but actually a letter for Z. The only uncommon letter here is Ы, but it is notoriously difficult one, and you can skip it in most words and people will still understand you. It might be even more helpful with wildly different script like hebrew, but I haven’t tried that myself yet.
I love that the braille just cuts off too:
“HOT SURFACE DO NOT”
As if to say: if you made it this far then you already know.
It says “hot surface do not touch” in full, actually. Braille uses single characters to represent some common letter combinations (“touch” is “t” + “ou” + “ch”). The words “do” and “not” are each contracted to a single letter (“d” and “n” respectively).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Braille#Contractions
Aaahh OK. I thought I was so clever to just count the characters lol. Classic Dunning-Kruger
Well, you can learn actual basic braille in like 15 minutes. The only important thing missing in it is ⠼ that denotes that following symbol is a a number. E.g. ⠁⠃⠉ is “abc” but ⠼⠁⠃⠉ is 123.
A neat trick is that it translates mostly phonetically across languages so, when traveling, you can get some idea and even practice a bit of reading of the local script by reading braille signs in elevators and buses. It is surprisingly difficult to find photos of those signs on the internet, even though they are literally everywhere, but, for example, this sign reads as KNOPKA V?ZOVA PERSONALA in braille, so you can infer that “КНОПКА” reads as “knopka” and not “khonka”, or that З thing is not a number but actually a letter for Z. The only uncommon letter here is Ы, but it is notoriously difficult one, and you can skip it in most words and people will still understand you. It might be even more helpful with wildly different script like hebrew, but I haven’t tried that myself yet.
For awhile in college, Pokemon endgame content gave me the ability to read braille…
… By looking at it.
Worst superpower ever.
I did this when I listened to Japanese songs before I knew how that writing system worked. I was always extremely confused.