“Bien” isn’t Chinese. Maybe Korean or Vietnamese. What is the full message?
can’t remember exactly, is something like ‘mo dao bien’ but I cant remember the first 2 words, just that they are very short words. I just know that when i told them i didnt understand they just typed “make bread”
I understand the rationale behind the existing systems like Pinyin. But you gotta admit, it’s got some serious drawbacks too.
If I were overhauling the system, I’d make it more like an audio rebus. For example, the Pinyin translation of “hello” in Chinese is “nihao”. An English speaker is gonna look at that, scratch his head, and wonder if it’s “nigh-ha-o”. No wonder they keep butchering the pronounciations on Firefly.
In my system, the Mandarin translation would be:
Hello: pronounced “knee” + “how”. Literally: “you” (knee) + “good” (how). A standard greeting, similar to a shorted form of “[how are] you, good?”.
Simple, effective, and a big bonus for people who want to start saying it immediately while fumbling with a translation guide. Any English speaker can say the word “knee” (which is unambiguous) and “how” (which is also unambiguous) and it sounds perfect to the Mandarin ear.
p.s. I think it’s hilarious that most people would look at “Pinyin” and say “Pin” + “Yin” (i.e. “pinion”). The actual pronounciation is nothing close to that. Say “pinion” to a Mandarin speaker and you will get a funny look.
Not quite.
It’s not that because “n” is assumed, it’s that the alphabet was created so that g represents /N/ (the “ng” in “sing”). in Samoan, g represents /N/. It is a distinct sound (a velar nasal), not a combination of n and g (in English, ng can represent /N/ or /Ng/).
Samoan also has what they call “good speech” and “bad speech”. In good speech, N represents /n/, and in bad speech it represents /g/. Likewise in good speech, T represents /t/ and in bad speech /k/.
You seriously think that it would make sense to replace a systematic transcription method with something like that? What about the many Mandarin sounds that don’t have equivalents in English? How would English speakers learn the difference between “qu” and “chu”, since neither can be precisely represented in English? If you pronounce both of them “chew”, you’re somewhere between having a ridiculously heavy accent and completely incomprehensible. “Knee how” is assuredly not “perfect to the Mandarin ear” (not least because it doesn’t reproduce tones, but also because the ‘-ao’ final doesn’t rhyme precisely with “how”. I wouldn’t call the vowels in “knee” and “ni3” identical either; there’s a subtly different quality to them, though I’m not precisely certain what it is.)
Not only that, but it would make transcription unnecessarily coupled to language. A different transcription system would have to be set up for every language that wanted to reproduce Mandarin words, since the words that are closest in sound to any given word in Mandarin will of course be different in every language.
Using casual transcriptions like that is fine in giving pronunciation clues in a writing intended for laypeople who don’t speak Mandarin, but even if a set of official rebus-like correspondences were set up, it wouldn’t be useful in the slightest for students of Mandarin, since it would encourage them to keep their heavy English accents, and it would be a nightmare to anyone trying any sort of academic work. I can hardly believe you are seriously suggesting this.
(Incidentally, only a grossly undereducated speaker of English would assume that “ni hao” is pronounced /naj ha o/, since English speakers are implicitly aware that the standard sounds of the vowels are different in other languages, and this is shown consistently in examinations of naive pronunciations of foreign words. Most English speakers are quite aware that “i” sounds like /i/ in most languages, even if they don’t consciously realize it.)
Actually Zhuyinfuhao aka bopomofo has/is being supplanted by pinyin in taiwan. Next thing you know there will be cross straits unification 
Not quite sure how adopted it is and the the time frame for switching over Taipei to Taibei et al. My understanding though is that school kids get pinyin these days.
My 5 year old in Shanghai is using a Taiwanese DVD to learn pinyin (as a supplement). Mainlanders have been using pinyin to learn Mandarin and characters for many years. It does the old bopomofo methodology but uses pinyin instead of the imitation japanese character set of bopomofo.
Someone asked about kids classes for learning Mandarin in the US. I can highlight the biggest problem is that in the classes no one is at the same level or same background. So you throw in kids with zero background and home environment with those that were raised in an exclusive mandarin environment and now learning English, with every variation in between. It can be extremely frustrating for everyone in the classes. Whatever class you check out, please address this issue with the teacher or you’re likely to have a kid that NEVER wants to speak Chinese.
The problem with this discussion is that “pinyin” is ambiguous - if you’re saying that Taiwan is switching to hanyu pinyin - i.e. the transcription system used by the PRC - I don’t believe that’s the case. Taiwan has recently begun to implement its own transcription scheme that’s very similar but not identical to hanyu pinyin. Mostly, I assume, to avoid appearing to imitate the PRC (though in reality of course their new transcription scheme is very much in imitation of hanyu pinyin.) However, both would be described as varieties of pinyin - which merely means transcription - in Chinese.
Even if that’s the case, I don’t think they’ve completely given up on zhuyin fuhao, have they? I’ve certainly seen it in children’s books published recently. And up to now at least, everyone I’ve met from Taiwan spells their name in Wade-Giles, and my understanding is that actual implementation of Taiwan’s new transcription system has been slow and rather patchy.
Yes, I do. I’d rather people have something that’s easy to learn and doesn’t discourage them with a huge initial barrier. Even if they only get 90% close to the pronounciations, I think it’s enough for conversational Mandarin. Accents are okay as long as it can be understood. You say “tomato”, I say “tomahto”, we both understand what the heck that is. But if I said “toe motley” most people wouldn’t know what that is.
There are an incredible number of things wrong with this. Pinyin is not merely a pedagogical tool for English-speaking foreigners to learn Chinese; it’s used, among other things, for teaching characters to children in China, for transcribing names and places into Roman letters for folks outside China, since seeing the characters for Mao Zedong’s name would be of little use in a high school history book in the United States. It’s used in some circumstances to give a pronunciation to an obscure character in writings for Chinese speakers. It’s used for transcribing words into other languages - if some attempt were made to spell out “feng shui” using soundalike English words, it would lead to confusion as to whether the phrase was a translation or a spelling of a Chinese word. And once again, your system wouldn’t be able to even remotely spell out most Chinese words, since there aren’t even near-equivalents to their sounds in English, and it would end up rendering lots of words with quite distinct sounds and meanings as homonyms.
Not only that, but it would solve no problems at all. Since pinyin’s use in pedagogy for foreign learners is only a small part of its use, replacing a systematized method with your ad hoc approach would create numerous problems in other areas. And for any foreign student of Chinese, it’s quite obvious that learning pinyin is a tiny part of learning Chinese. We spent perhaps a week on it in my introductory Mandarin class (including the time we spent explicitly studying Mandarin phonology, which would be necessary either way, but obviously much more confusing without a systematic means of spelling Chinese words); I’m sure that I spent more time memorizing vocabulary and characters for each lesson than I did learning pinyin during the brief time I spent learning it. Since pinyin would lead students to assume that many words were pronounced identically when they weren’t, it would lead to more confusion later on when students tried to remember which “chew” they were using - “qu” or “chu”. Not only is the system unworkable because of the lack of near-equivalents in English for most Chinese syllables, but even if some attempt were made, it would eventually hobble any students who learned it, because later on they would have to relearn the pronunciations of every word. And it would mean there would be no way to unambiguously communicate the pronunciation of a Chinese word. As it is, bilingual dictionaries use characters and pinyin, which means that under your system, I’d have no way to look up a word and understand how to pronounce it.
Your idea would make things easier for foreign students for perhaps a week, and then it would make things much, much worse. For everyone else who uses pinyin, it would be ridiculous. You could make some argument that a separate system could be used to teach beginning Mandarin, and leave pinyin intact for its use in other contexts. But as I’ve explained, even that would be a major disservice to students; unlearning things that you’ve learned wrong is always much harder than learning them right the first time.
No offense, but your idea that there is apparently no need at all for a systematic romanization of Mandarin is utterly ridiculous. Either for pedagogy or for the many other uses of pinyin, a systematic method to transcribe pronunciations is vital. For a student who needs to learn Mandarin, learning pinyin is a tiny, absolutely miniscule effort. Replacing it with your ridiculous Frankenstein idea would be just an appallingly bad idea. The problem it solves is nonexistent - after all, any student of a foreign language has to learn how to read and write it. The difficulty of learning pinyin is invisible compared to that of learning to read and write, say, French. The problems your idea would create are manifold. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Your example of the word tomato is merely an example of free variation. Not all words lend themselves to that.
A hijack to a great thread. Excalibre’s explanation is great. I had wondered that before, but since I haven’t ever studied / learned Chinese I didn’t know this.
Japanese organize their kana, syllable based writing system into an order a - i - u - e - o, followed by ka- ki - ku - ke - ko. The “s” sounds follow next, and the “Monbusho System” taught in elementary schools, has sa-si-su-se-so. However, the real pronunciation is “shi” (pronounced similar to the English “she”) so the Modified Hepburn style, the de facto standard, has sa - shi - su - se - so.
The next group, the “t” is written either ta - ti - tu - te - to under the more literal style but under Modified Hepburn is written ta - chi - tsu - te - to, which closer represents the actual pronunciation. Someone who understands Japanese phonetics could understand the proper pronunciation by either system, but non-speakers would not.
I established a lightly modified Hepburn style for my office since my staff was often using the Monbusho System, and we would get dealer names written as “Syuhen” instead of the more phonetic “Shuhen.” It would only irritate me, a dedicated Hepburn fan, but my head office would be pronouncing the dealer name wrong.
As far as The Controvert’ssuggestion to transliterate into the closest English word, it may be fine for a casual visitor but I think it would hurt the serious student. There was this “memory expert” on David Letterman, once who taught David how to count to ten, using the closest English words. So, she taught “itchy” for “ichi.” While it does help you remember the word, one must also know the real pronunciation in order to not be setting up bad habits. Learning a foreign language is a daunting task, and additional help would be great, but I wouldn’t think that this would be more detrimental in the long run.
Well, I haven’t lived or even visited Taiwan since 1989 so not claiming to be authorative. That said, you’re right. There is Hanyu Pinyin, used in China. And the “we’re not copying China but likely to be inferior adaptation so we can claim to not be copying from China” tongyong pinyin. [btw, not a Taiwan versus PRC thing, but peanut head on a pogo stick, copying 80% of something and then doing the other 20% less well is not my idea of brilliant innovation]
Link: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/t/to/tongyong_pinyin.htm
Tongyong Pinyin (通用拼音, literally “Universal/General Usage Sound-combining”) is the current official romanization of the Chinese language adopted by the national government (although not all local governments) of the Republic of China since late 2000, announced by the Mandarin Promotion Council of the Ministry of Education. Like all previous ROC official romanizations, it is based on the official Chinese dialect of Mandarin. Around 80 percent of the Tongyong Pinyin (A unit of spoken language larger than a phoneme) syllables are spelled identically to those of Mainland Hanyu Pinyin.[
And then there is this link: http://www.answers.com/topic/tongyong-pinyin
Some have criticised Tongyong Pinyin for matching more than one traditional bopomofo initial to the letters c and s. Others have pointed out that every single Mandarin syllable can be expressed in equal or fewer keystrokes in Hanyu Pinyin. Nonetheless, the largest difficulty may lie in that Hanyu Pinyin is both the standard of the PRC, and the internationally accepted ISO standard for the romanization of Mandarin Chinese. For those who have studied Mandarin outside Taiwan and for those who are accustomed to doing business in China, Hanyu Pinyin may be quite indispensable. On the other hand, Tongyong Pinyin supporters have argued that their system avoids q and x, letters that are confusing to many foreigners as to their proper pronuncation.
Don’t know about Taiwan these days but Tong Yong is most well known in PRC as the “general” in “general motors.”
This really, really, really bugs me, especially in the case of Indian names, like Rajiv, which Americans Frenchify into “Razheev.” Ugh! It’s horrible! And stupid! Stop it! Time for a Pit thread.
Simple and effective? Haven’t you noticed how much confusion there is on this very board when people use these ways of explaining pronunciation? Every time there’s an AR or AH or AW or O in one of those things, people get all flummoxed. and this is when it’s just native English speakers trying to explain English pronunciations!
I think a lot of the ivory tower academics (resisting urge to name names) are married to the existing methods because they’ve already invested a lot of time and energy into learning them.
This tends to blind one from noticing problems like kung fu <> gong fu. Yes, you are free to learn the language by putting Qs and Xs all over the place. But it makes it tougher for the average American to understand, because most Qs and Xs in English do not represent the “sh” sound. To most people, “k” and “z” are vastly different than “sh”.
This is precisely the problem that was raised by the OP.
If I’m learning the word hello and I hear it said a few times by a native speaker, I’ll be able to say “knee” and “how” with the correct intonations. Most other people will, too.
I doubt you can find English words which sounds close to all the myraid Manadrin ones which exists. Let not even get started on the other dialects yet. Can you find a close fiting word for “Zhuge”? How about “Sima”?
Kung Fu sounds nothing like the way Chineses pronounce the actual “Gong Fu” in Manadrin. When since it is wrong to pronounce something accurately in a langauge?
As someone who use Manadrin in his daily life as a Mother Tongue, “Knee how” comes nowhere close to “ni hao” In fact, if you speak it as you would say in English, I would have no idea what you talking about.
I am advocating accurate pronounciations. Gong fu is much better and closer than kung fu. Yet, most of the time it is spelled “kung fu” in the US. This is the problem being raised by the OP.
Don’t give me that native speaker bull… as someone who uses Mandarin in daily life as a Mother Tongue, if someone said “knee how” to me, I’d know exactly what they were talking about. Maybe it’d take a few repeats for you. But it’s a lot closer than “nigh ha oh” (rhymes with Ohio), which truthfully, I wouldn’t be able to understand no matter how many times it’s repeated.
And I think attacking the motives of people who disagree with you is inappropriate and contemptible. I also think you clearly don’t know any Chinese if you think “a lot of time and energy” is needed to learn pinyin.
Why do you think pinyin ought to be replaced by something easy for “the average American” to understand? You explicitly stated that you thought the system should never have been invented and instead a clumsy system of rebus pronunciations should be used instead. As I noted, there are many, many more uses of pinyin than simply spelling words for Americans to read. Like I said, in writings for laypeople it may be more appropriate to try to communicate pronunciations using spellings that simply approximate the pronunciation rather than using pinyin. However, the notion that we could do without pinyin is simply false, and based on the assumption that its use is confined to the extremely narrow contexts in which you may see it - magazine articles about fengshui and suchlike. Since uses like this are a miniscule part of what pinyin is used for, the fact that it would make most other applications of pinyin much more difficult or completely impossible makes your idea nonsensical.
You don’t need any sort of transcription to repeat what someone else says. What does that have to do with anything, anyway? Why would it be helpful to mix a native speaker’s example with the confusing and incorrect pronunciation suggested by “knee how”? If you’re going to the trouble of studying under a native speaker, presumably you have some intent to actually learn the language, which means learning a perfectly regular system of spelling is an incredibly minor task.
Should uses of French words in English also be eliminated? After all, how is someone supposed to guess what “rendezvous” means? Should we spell it “rondayvoo”? Of course not.
Seriously, try to imagine any problem that would be solved by getting rid of pinyin and replacing it with ad hoc spellings like you imagine should be done. Since those pronunciations - as has been pointed out already - cause problems for speakers of different dialects of English, should Chinese words be spelled differently in Britain than in America? How would they be spelled in France? I honestly can’t imagine what you think could possibly be gained by what you’re suggesting. Pinyin doesn’t perfectly serve “the average American” with no knowledge of Chinese because it was never intended to. “The average American” who doesn’t speak Chinese can pronounce these words however they wish, since they won’t manage to even approximate the actual pronunciation. However, for the more serious and important uses of pinyin, a systematic romanization is vital. Do you think books could be catalogued under your system? How would you spell the name of Taiwanese president Chen Shuibian? Or the provinces of Xinjiang or Guangxi? I’ve already pointed out the fact that most Chinese words don’t have any near equivalents in English, which you haven’t even responded to. You can use your one single example of a phrase that can be approximated with English words all you like, but your scheme should, ideally, be able to represent the whole of Mandarin, not just a single greeting.
If you still insist that most people read “ni hao” as /naj ha o/, though, I want some cites. Because I don’t believe “the average American” is anywhere near as stupid as you suggest.
I don’t know how you get /naj ha o/ out of “ni hao”, but I guess that shows how off it can get reading those kinds of translations. Let me ask you this… what is easier and closer, “Qing” or “Ching”? Most people would look at “Qing” and mispronounce it “Kwing”. I’m advocating the more accurate “Ching”, which people can easily pronounce.
/naj ha o/ is the SAMPA equivalent of your constantly repeated “nigh ha oh”. I was attempting to represent it unambigously. Since I’ve never once heard someone pronounce the phrase that way, I’m still waiting for some evidence from you.
“Ching” is not an accurate representation of <qing>. There is no possible accurate representation of that word using English spelling, because it can’t be pronounced with the sounds present in English.
Since you appear to have completely stopped responding to any of the points I’ve made, I see no need to continue this discussion. You’ve made it quite clear that you have little understanding of the issues involved, and you’re focusing on one single context which is at most a minor aspect of the use of pinyin. Either read my posts and respond to the points I make, or go away, because watching you repeat yourself again and again is growing wearisome.