Thread: Venus Series City Navigator China NT 2010.30 ENG in PinYin

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Originally Posted by syzygy

Garmin's search is done by radial scan from a starting point, default to your current GPS position. To search items on a China or other map, you need to change the starting point to somewher on that map. This can be done by the "Near" function (a button or menu item) on your device's GUI.

Exactly, that was what we used in China : the search function. The device listed us the nearest metro or railway station, for instance, but you can use it
also for banks, road exits, hospitals, etc..... If the map is installed on your device, well...that's it, I think it's ok.
You say "I get street names but when I select a street there is no information for it", but keep in mind that it's not Google Maps you're looking at, man.
It's not exactly the same way to use, and since the map covers the whole territory of China, you can't have the same precision.
Anyway, it's largely sufficient to find your way and help you find roads, if you learn a little bit of Chinese pinyin terms beforehand, like :
bei = north, nan = south, xi = west, dong = east / lu = road, hence nanji lu = east ji road.
And for some adresses, we had to take care of the empty spaces : sometimes you don't know if you have to write the adresse in one or two words, eventually we tried both ways and got the answer, the map was really helpful in Beijing, always found the adresses we were looking at, even in small hutongs.

Thanks everyone for all for the help!

Knowing how to read pinyin is pretty much required for this map, at least for pronunciation purposes. Most cab drivers can't read pinyin so if you dont say it out loud, they wont know where you want to go. The reason they can't read it is because they are usually older (50+) and come from the rural countryside, so they never learned pinyin. Their education came from a time before China had standardized education (let alone one that included pinyin). The cab drivers end up in the cities because as farmers their land is annexed by the Chinese communist gov't (usually to make way for a city/road) in exchange for money. Having no skills, they head to the city (where all the money is), buy a cab and drive (no education needed).

Originally Posted by shalero

It's not exactly the same way to use, and since the map covers the whole territory of China, you can't have the same precision.

That explains it a bit...but my default North America map has much more detailed info and is bigger. I think it's just cuz of the lack of any sort of urban planning in many cities in China. I live in China 10 months out of 12 and it's absolute chaos trying to find an exact location for a business. Highways and overpasses are literally built within a month, roads are demolished or blocked off completely due to construction....so take this map's accuracy with a huge grain of salt. When I saw no address info for this map I was wondering if something didn't transfer over, but rather this is all done using POI only.

ditto for the pinyin translation too. Some places are not quite don't quite use the right pinyin translation for that city (probably because of the slight accent inherent to the city). Good tip about adding/deleting spaces. Usually if 2 characters form a word then you keep the pinyin together (no spaces).

ie. Shanghai City has three characters: Shang + Hai + Shi. Because Shang + Hai go together to form a proper noun, there shouldnt be a space between the pinyin for it. That's why we write "Shanghai Shi" but this map has it as "Shang Hai Shi"