It’s a religious thing. You think zhuyinfuhao is the bee’s knees, I think it’s crap and not very practical out in the real world. YMMV. I get that your opinion is your cite. 真棒！
No, I’m not saying that “re” in mandarin sounds the same as “remember”. Like ANY language, one soon learns that “re” may or may not equate with one’s native language and how to pronounce it correctly.
And a cite please for typing going the way of the dodo bird. Especially when speaking Mandarin. I’d truly like to see it since nothing I’ve seen so far for Mandarin speech to text works very well. That said, Microsoft seem to have cracked Chinese sign language to ASL and to text. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FTm7stqXHs
i’ve never used zhuyin fuhao, but the very fact that it’s written in pinyin here reflects how impractical it is. and no, the keyboard is not going away anytime soon, despite the best efforts of touchscreen and voice recognition technology.
Most modern Chinese input systems on computers use pinyin anyway. Enable the Chinese keyboard on your iPhone and you’ll see that… it’s an English keyboard. However, when you type in the pinyin, the phone suggests the Chinese characters that fit, and you pick the right one. If you type in a phrase, the phone may even be able to deduce which characters you mean without further input.
Correct, except that in school they start learning the kanji before they learn Romaji, and probably even before katakana, although I don’t know that for sure.
Knowing kanji is really helpful for navigating Taiwan, especially since Taiwan uses the traditional form which looks much more like the kanji than the simplified version used in China.
No way. Can you see a crowded office with a thousand people speaking to their computers and also trying to take notes while listening to someone? “This guy is a jerk.”
@OP: I’d ask my dad (born and raised in Malaysia) but his answer would probably be pretty much the same as the previous posts.
That said, my brother and I went to kindergarten in Singapore and I remember I learned the English alphabet before Chinese characters. I forgot all my Chinese eventually.
Thanks – I wasn’t sure of the order of the first kanji (learned in 1st grade), katakana and romaji. However, I was sure that hiragana came first: I have a jigsaw puzzle with one piece for each of the hiragana, illustrated with a word starting with the hiragana character (except for the obviously impossible “wo” and “n”), e.g. a picture of an apple (“ringo”) for “ri”. It has a few words written in katakana (e.g., “Anpanman”* for “a” and “ramen” for “ra”), but those words have the parallel hiragana characters also written on the puzzle piece for the children still learning hiragana who would not be expected to know katakaba yet.
Anpanman is a very popular character for young children in Japan, whose name roughly translates into English as “Bean bun boy”.
Kids learn the hiragana in kindergarten and a quick google of the question shows that they teach katakana in first grade, but it would be after they start learning the kanji.
It looks like 4th grade when they learn Romaji.
The *kana *above other characters showing pronunciation is called furigana. When they want you to write it in katakana (which are block characters and easier to read) they write it as フリガナ. If they want you to write it in hiragana then they write it as ふりがな.
Part of the reason for this is that (as I understand it) - kids don’t have the motor control to write chinese till they get older, as opposed to be able to form roman alphabet much younger (and proper form, stroke order and weight mean squat in english but are important in chinese)
This is quite an informative thread. I had no idea that Chinese kids actually learn their Roman ABC first.
Given that, and the fact that pinyin entry seems to be standard on computers, is there any popular movement for going over to the alphabetic system altogether?
No. Too many homophones. There are loads upon loads of words that sound the same, but they are all written with different characters. Ironically, alphabetical writing would tend to create a problem. This phenomenon happens both in Chinese and Japanese.
It is not unusual, when you are (for instance) giving your name to somebody, to say “My name is X-Y, written with the character for <whatever>”. Or to quickly “air-draw” the character in question with your finger on the palm of your other hand to demonstrate.
As an example of the humongous amount of homophones in Chinese, I introduce to you the poem “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”, which is a somewhat nonsense poem, very artificial (of course) but which nonetheless manages to tell a whole story using nothing but the syllable “shi” (in different tones, but anyway).
Of course, the language used is Classical Chinese (and the author wrote that poem to illustrate why he thought that it would be good for the government and other official institutions to switch to vernacular Chinese as their work language), but modern Chinese (and Japanese) has the same problem. To a lesser degree, of course, but still has it.
Just as an illustration, here goes the poem as it would be written in Alphabetic characters (in PinYin, with tone marks) and, later on, as it would be written with Chinese characters. You will agree that using alphabetic script would make understanding the poem a total nightmare:
« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
Translation, for those who would like to know what this means:
« Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »
In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.
With at least one big exception, such as mentioned by Voyager: until fairly recently, Taiwan did not use Romanized pinyin as a means of instruction for young children. Kids learned the Roman alphabet in school when studying English.
I think they have introduced its use in the past decade, but when I was growing up as an American Born Chinese with relatives in Taiwan, my weekend “Chinese school” materials were bought from Taiwan and they used a phonetic system “bo po mo fo” (in Chinese called zhu yin fu hao, meaning “phonetic component annotations”) with the sounds and the word tone in little symbols written next to (on the right side of) the characters we were learning. The local Chinese newspapers had a “kids’ section” with the phonetic annotations next them, like training wheels. After a while you were expected to just remember the characters themselves, and more advanced texts no longer had them at all.
This was partly a carryover from the split between the Communists and the Nationalist Chinese governments, as pinyin was only widely promulgated after the Communists took power.
So basically, to answer the OP: in teaching Chinese to kids without pinyin (either Taiwan until recently if not now, or before 1950), as was obviously done for thousands of years, the approach is to teach the words in sets from “basic” to “rare”, with the most common words of course getting reinforced a lot, and the student memorizes them all over time. As with faces, one typically can read (recognize) more characters than one can write.
Just to add on to Robardin. Traditionally, only the elite kids were educated. China had something like 6% literacy rate IIRC at the revolution.
Kids didn’t learn from the absolute simplest character such as for one, two, three (一, 二, 三). Rather there was a common calligraphy primer that was where Lu Xun took the name and title for arguably his best story “Kongyiji” (孔乙己). I can’t readily find a copy of the primer on line but I believe “kong yi ji” were either the first 3 characters or in the first group of characters.
Anyone have a link to the calligraphy primer that was the basis for Kongyij?
Which reminds me, the word order for Japanese now is the straightforward a-i-u-e-o, ka-ki-ku-ke-ko, etc., but this used to not be the case. It was based on the order given in a song, i-ro-ha. (wiki link in Japanese).
One revelation I had after spending time learning Kanji is that we treat our own words the same way. Sure, we learn to sound them out as a kid, but when we’re reading, we read the whole word, as if it were a character, instead of seeing the individual letters. It’s a much faster way of reading. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone knows about how that brain makes that switch-- from sounding out the words when we are first learning to read and write, to seeing each word as a whole unit.
as the second. Looks good to me!