I only recently realized that I have only a partial understanding of currency symbols—especially the ones that are easy to mix up. Take the Taiwan dollar symbol, for example: NT$ and $ look similar, but in fact more than 30 countries use the $ symbol, including US dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, and Singapore dollars—it's really easy to get them confused.

When I used to do foreign exchange trading, I studied seriously how to distinguish different countries’ currencies. For example, the euro symbol €, the British pound symbol £, and the Japanese yen ¥ are immediately recognizable as belonging to their respective countries. But that ¥ symbol is a mess: in Japan it represents the Japanese yen, while in China it represents the Chinese renminbi—it's basically impossible to tell them apart. So later, everyone standardized it to write CNY￥ or JPY￥ to differentiate them.

In fact, the Taiwan dollar symbol is simply NT$, so writing it that way helps prevent it from being mistaken for US dollars. I later found that instead of memorizing symbols, it’s more practical to remember currency codes. For example, USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, and TWD—these three-letter codes are universal in the forex market. When you see EUR/USD, you know it’s the exchange rate between the euro and the dollar.

Here’s a small tip: on Mac and Windows keyboards, there are shortcut keys to type these symbols. The euro is Shift+Option+2 (Mac) or Alt+E (Windows), the British pound is Option+3 or Alt+L, and the US dollar is simply Shift+4. Although there isn’t a specific shortcut for the Taiwan dollar symbol, you can usually just type NT$.

One more interesting thing: in forex, the ฿ symbol represents Thai baht, but in cryptocurrency it stands for Bitcoin—entirely different meanings. These little details are actually pretty important, especially if you’re doing international trading or investing. Getting just one symbol wrong could become a problem with your accounting.