You may have honed your Chinese language skills for years or, for that matter, you may be a native Chinese but when you get into a Chinese web forum, you may feel you have stumbled into a bizarre world where every letter is recognizable but the text as a whole reads like Greek.

To decipher the enigma of netspeak, we assembled a list of acronyms that Chinese netizens have created and popularized. You may not be able to find them in any dictionary, but they'll come in handy if you want to be on the same wavelength as China's online population.

Like "LOL" (laugh out loud) in English, most acronyms in China are shorthand for words that already exist. MF is for ma fan (trouble), PF for pei fu (admire), NB for niu bi (wow), JS for jian shang (evil merchants).