Woah, dude, your site gives the Mandarin pronunciation followed by the Cantonese. :eek:
My Cantonese is weak but I looked up some obvious words that I know in both languages, for example “wen” or 问.
Well, then you probably know what best fits your language learning style. I would suggest if you do get really serious about learning Chinese, is that you have to learn characters. IMHO it’s not possible to really get good chinese without understanding the characters, and how they fit together. Chinese is an extremely logical language, but you have to have the building blocks. I suppose it is possible to get those blocks without memorizing 6 or 10 thousand characters but I’ve yet to meet someone studying Chinese as a foreign language that has gotten to an impressive level of fluency via oral work alone.
This is strange. It’s not like there’s any inherent or natural relationship between the language and the writing system.
Maybe it’s just that the people who have learned to write it have usually been, in virtue of that very fact, the people who have worked longer and harder at learning Chinese.
-FrL-
A distinction should probably be made between learning Chinese in Chinese-speaking areas and elsewhere. Illiterate folks have learned fluent Chinese as a second language for millennia. That said, I’m with China Guy. An awful lot of literate people get so thrown by another script that they make a Herculean effort to learn Russian, Arabic, Chinese, whatever without learning the writing system, or else decide that they can wait and then learn to read and write once they achieve fluency. But the writing system can be a tool to help learn the language, and I can’t really see an advantage to avoiding it. I’ve only flirted with Chinese, but it didn’t take long to learn a couple dozen characters, or to learn how to look them up in a dictionary. Once you’ve done that a great curtain of mystery is lifted. It is completely worth the effort.
I agree that the question about fitting sounds to phonemes is interesting. Standard english has lots of phonemes that most people aren’t even aware of. Like the “zh” sound in “pleasure” or “leisure” or “azure” or “Jean-luc Picard”. Here’s a phoneme that we don’t even have a standardized workaround for. Or that we have two “th” sounds, not one (who do I have to kill to bring edh and thorn back into the alphabet?). And of course, all sorts of vowels that can be just about anything.
So the question could be, after a few centuries of “phonetic” writing, does spoken language pronunciation become modified to fit more closely with the phonetic spelling. Do those phonems that don’t have a standardized system of representation become deprecated and start to fade away?
And it seems to me as a non-linguist that the quick answer is no. Look at our english spelling, and our pronunciation of many words has very little to do with how those words are pronounced. We learn the words first, and only later learn to spell them. People don’t start mispronouncing “action” as “ak-tee-on” when they learn to spell it, and eventually ak-tee-on becomes the standard way of pronouncing the word. It seems like the spelling is fixed, but the pronounciation varies, which is why we have all these weird silent k’s and silent gh’s, and so forth. The gh phoneme vanished from standard english, despite being right there written down in our spelling. Writing it down didn’t preserve it.
The exception would be foreign words that become pronounced as they’re spelled, like “Paris” pronounced “Pare-is” rather than “Par-ee”.
The only problem is that the only language I’m familiar with is English, so I have no idea how typical english is. I do know that other languages have undergone periodic spelling reforms, but I don’t know whether spelling reform is sometimes done because of widespread pronunciation changes.
It goes beyond that with Chinese. At first, all I wanted was to be orally fluent, but I soon realized that to really understand how the language works, to really get the meaning behind certain words, it was much, much easier to look at what the composite characters mean.
For example (and far from the best example, just off the top of my head), kuo4zhan3 means to expand, spread, or enlarge. But there are actually a number of words that mean something similar, and it’s hard to really understand which word fits which situation (a very common problem). There’s kuo4da4, kuo4chong1, kuo4zhang1, etc. Sometimes they can be used interchangeably, but sometimes not. Looking at the characters for kuo4zhan3, kuo4 has that expanding/spreading meaning. zhan3 can have a similar meaning but also encompasses a sense of development (like in the word fa1zhan3, which means to develop). Thus, you know that kuo4zhan3 has to do with expansions that are developing towards something, and probably doesn’t refer to say, a cyclical swelling.
Since any given syllable pronunciation (such as zhan3) can be any one of a multitude of characters, it’s nice to be able to read and know that it is indeed the zhan3 that is used in fa1zhan3, which not only makes it easier to understand what kuo4zhan3 means, but also makes it easier to remember, at least for me. When I hear the word now, since I am familiar with the characters, I can parse the word as kuo4da4-fa1zhan3 (expand-develop), which is a pretty good summary of the meaning.
This is much, much easier than learning every single 2-syllable combination’s precise meaning just by pronunciation alone. I never thought I’d say it, but I do need me my characters!
No, I want to learn characters. I’ve learned several dozen already, primarily from Rosetta Stone and those kids books I was talking about. So please, if someone can help me search google.cn for those first-grade PRC elementary school readers, I’d greatly appreciate it. They’ve got both pinyin and characters. I use the pinyin to search in a computer dictionary, then painstakingly try to match up the character among the dozens of results. I think this is a good way for me to learn in a ‘natural’ way. It’s a bit funny, but it’s actually easier to recognize the distincitive characters than those damn overlapping syllables, so the pinyin on the page doesn’t subtract from the learning at all and helps a lot. (Looking up characters entirely by stroke is maddening, and just c&p a character and getting the answer isn’t good either. I think I’ve found a good compromise with my method.)
I may not be reading the thread closely enough, but it doesn’t seem like the OP was answered directly.
It was possible because all spoken languages are divisible into what are called phonemes (see link for definition). These phonemes are artifacts of speech, independent of writing, and so exist in all languages, pre-literate or not – the point being that these phonemes already existed in Chinese to be “described” by phonetic writing just like they do in any other language. That Chinese did not have phonetic writing for most of its history had no bearing.
Essentially, yes. Yes, it did. Except that those divisions – the phonemes mentioned above – were always present in Chinese.
In commiting any speech to phonetic writing (or an approximation thereof), there is always some square-peg-in-round-hole action. The Latin alphabet was laid imperfectly onto English, the Etruscan alphabet was laid imperfectly onto Latin, the Greek alphabet was laid imperfectly onto Etruscan … and so forth.
As pointed out upthread, English has not always been a written language. That’s true of all modern written languages – it’s important to remember that the fit is not always, and can never be, “natural” and perfect. Pinyin is no different.
Frylock writes:
> Of course there are. Alex’s post makes it clear that by “non-phonetic language”
> he means “A language that is not normally written down using an alphabet.”
> There are plenty of such languages. Chinese is one of them.
It’s far from clear what Alex_Dubinsky meant in his post. Apparently, bordelond agrees with me about this, because he/she has also tried to explain to Alex_Dubinsky what a phoneme is and that all languages have them. I still think that Alex_Dubinsky didn’t understand in his OP that Chinese not being written down in a phonetic script has nothing to do with it having phonemes.
What are you talking about? Look at the very next thing you wrote:
Exactly. Explaining about phonemes is exactly the right way to answer the perfectly clear quetions Alex asked in the OP.
Meanwhile, in the post of mine you were responding to, I was not addressing Alex’s OP but rather a later one.
-FrL-
Also, my exact question was “naturally divide into 20 or so sounds” and my suspicion was partly on the mark because it turns out there’s twice that many phonemes, encoded as nuances in the pinyin.
Also, I’m not exactly convinced about this phoneme business (I mean I agree there’s phonemes… just read). For example, when reading china_guys pronunciation guide, it tried to explain how to pronounce pinyin’s “sh.” It went on that it is not the english ‘sh’ but does sound pretty much like the ‘sh’ in the word ‘shirt’. In that particular word, the letters ‘ir’ induce the tongue to travel back in the mouth for pronouncing ‘sh’, which is how the Chinese always do it. But if good english speakers pronounce that word ‘shirt’ with that sound, would it hurt your pronounciation to use a different kind of ‘sh’? Phoneme is the unit of understanding, but there’s definately sub-phonemes that define good annunciation, or a standard accent, or a pleasant voice. They very much exist and are even worth learning (i’m sure any voice coach will tell you exactly that). So I don’t know… at the very least there’s phonemes and sub-phonemes, but in that case there’s got to be sounds in a gray zone too. You know, when I tried researching “the number of phonemes in English” and found no two sources that would agree on one number, I will bet you anything it wasn’t just because English has several accents.
You might want to check out the concept of allophones. That’s the name for when two different sounds are understood to be the same by speakers of a given language, as in your “shirt” example. The article explains it better.
Cool!
The examples section alone adds 40 (!) extra sounds (phones) to English that are invoked only in specific phonetic contexts.
You described it well. Even when two native chinese speakers talk, they frequently interrupt each other to ask specifically what character is being referred to. There are so many subtle differences between characters that sound the same.
Keep in mind that characters are pictograms with specific meanings and associations. Maybe it’s an added layer on top of the sound or an extra dimension. I’d argue that characters are a significant part of the Chinese language and thus different from an alphabet based language. (There was a 6 page Winter of our Missed Content thread on this subject). Not only does a word have a common definition like in English, but there is *also * a common pictogram. I can’t explain what difference this makes, but IMHO this commonly understood extra dimension is not insignificant. Even a native illiterate Chinese speaker is limited to the one language dimension.
With a decent base of Chinese characters, the average reader can take two characters that they recognize, put them together and have a high percentage chance of knowing what that compounded meaning is. Think Greek suffixes for an example such as “-ist” eg chemist, physicist. In Chinese, you have a character of “ist” (but differs in that there are few or zero exceptions), eg chemist, physicist, doctor, nurse, professor would *all * have that “ist” suffix.
As long as the other word uses the same phoneme, it should have the same equivalent pronunciation. Again, keep in mind that the English phoneme used in “shirt” may not be an exact 100% match to the Beijing pronunciation/phoneme for shi(r) (verb “to be” - I can’t display Chinese on this new PC yet). If “shit” was used instead of “shirt”, I think that’s a different phoneme, and in Chinese shit (equivalent to shi) and shirt (equivalent to the Beijing R shi(r)). Someone that does understand phonemes, is this right?
Linguists use an equivalent sound in one language as a base to train speakers how to make the correct sound in the other language. My Chinese professor at University was also a linguist. If you couldn’t make the correct sound in Chinese, he’d walk you through a checklist of English words until he found a word you could pronounce properly in English with the equivalent Chinese sound. I also witnessed him work with some Hong Kong Chinese with very thick accents and some horrible English mispronunciations, and within two minutes would find a different word with an equivalent sound that they could pronounce. I can’t think of a great example, but something like you would mispronounce " noun" but could pronounce “pronoun” correctly. Then you would work on isolating the noun part of pronoun, and the pronunciation would be much improved if not perfect.
I’m not sure if I can follow everything here, but I suspect in some instances you’re confusing phonemes with morphemes. A phoneme is a sound that distinguishes meaning, but doesn’t have any meaning (semantic value) in itself. A morpheme “is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning.”
The thing about Chinese, I think, is that its morphology is sort of codified by the characters, and the morphology is much closer to the surface, as it were. It’s easy to see the morphological components of a given two- or three-character word when each morpheme is represented by its own little picture.
But I also believe that China Guy is exaggerating the influence of this written quirk upon the spoken language. English is equally rich in morphemes for any given word–if anything even more so, given the language’s mongrel heritage. But most people don’t realize this because we don’t use ideograms. (Sorry, another nitpick: Chinese primarily uses ideograms or maybe logograms, not pictograms.
Example: even if I’m illiterate, I know what a “television” is. I don’t need to worry about “tele” meaning “far” in Greek and “vision” meaning “sight” in Latin. OTOH, a Chinese speaker can point to the characters for “electric” and “vision” put together and have a pretty good idea where the word dianshi, “television” in Chinese, came from. But he doesn’t have to know this to understand the word, no more so than the English speaker.
China_guy, no. It seems there are phonemes, complementary allophones, and free variants. Phonemes are usually defined by a ‘minimal pair’, which is two words that are almost the same, except for that one sound. However, not every phoneme has a minimal pair (and there are minimal pairs that aren’t phonemes). Sometimes it’s decided just cuz they’re just ‘obviously’ different (well, no, there’s other criteria too). Complementary allophones are differences in pronounciation that have a clear pattern to them across many speakers, but aren’t quite important enough to be phonemes (consider ‘p’ in ‘pin’ vs ‘spin’. in chinese these even belong to different phonemes, and the latter is written ‘b’ in pinyin). Free variants (the other type of allophone) are peculiarities that are specific to one person. They can also be specific to a group of people, but they’re not important/regular enough to be complementary allophones.
So as you can see, obviously, there are judgement calls everywhere. So yes, it seems a language IS a zoo of sound and not just a set of a few dozen phonemes. But it’s a heirarchical zoo, with some elements clearly more important than others. The sprawling heirarchy is what accounts for, respectively, comprehensibility, dialect, accent, diction, voice, and ultimately tone and mood.
Pinyin and any other alphabet can only hope to capture the upper echelons. And even then, as well all know too well in the online world, that’s often nowhere enough to understand what a person is actually saying (much less to imagine them saying it). To have excellent pronounciation and speech (eg, to be a spy at the CIA), you need mastery of most of this pyramid. Which is a monumental task.
Anyway, thanks guys, I’ve learned a lot. Especially how fundamentally important it is to forget pinyin and all that garbage (i mean for this purpose) and just listen to speakers on tv and movies and take it in, focusing on what you actually hear than on preconceived notions such as how it’s spelled. Hopefully, understanding the challenge before me, I’ll one day speak so well that no one will even know i’m not chinese 
I apologize if someone else has already said this, I haven’t read the whole thread.
Taiwan recently decided to standardize its romanizations since, for example, the street 忠孝 can be written “Chunghsiao, Zhongxiao and Jhongsiao.” This gets to be really difficult for a lot of foreigners, seeing as place names around Taiwan change (When you’re in Taipei, signs lead you to XinDian, but once you get out of Taipei all you see is HsinTian).
Taiwan, for some reason, didn’t want to go with the most recognized romanization, pinyin. They’ve opted for TongYong, which almost no one outside of Taiwan studies. In fact, I don’t even know of people inside Taiwan who study it, seeing as I’ve never met anyone from any university here that studies Chinese with anything other than pinyin.
This said, the big difference, though, is that Taiwanese by and large don’t know how to read pinyin, tongyong, etc. While the Chinese use pinyin to learn Chinese and to write with a computer, the Taiwanese use Zhuyin, which is why I learned it. If you want to read Children’s books and stuff to learn Chinese in Taiwan, you have to be able to read zhuyin.
Not true. See previous reference to allophones.
-FrL-
But that also happens to someone who’s learned any Western European language when learning another one.
Europa is pronounced europa in Spanish but oigopa in German, using Spanish transliterations. Same spelling and both languages are internally consistant.