Characters vs. romanization

Arts & Sciences Culture & History
21
quote:
Originally posted by cranky laowai: In short, the Ministry of Education want to use Chinese characters, not romanization, not only for dialects of Chinese other than Mandarin but also for languages from [i]completely different language groups[/i]. This is nothing short of astonishing.
I hope there's a Chinese historian here.. I seem to remember that different Chinese languages/dialects, some of which would be different languages altogether, used to be represented by different character sets if at all, and Mandarin and the way it was written was chosen as THE standard (when? I have no clue, that's why we need the historian) because that was where the capital of China was.

This meant that to represent dialects or languages other than Mandarin the Chinese characters we know today had to be used…so there’s a historical parallel.

Whether it works is another question. Certainly any written standard in any language can be used to render another language, at least in part, similar to using English to create an approximate pronounciation for a foreign word (um, at least I do that when I can’t remember my IPA).

As someone else mentioned, Japanese and Korean also use Chinese characters, a throwback to a time when Chinese culture was thought superior and education meant education in Chinese not the local languages–so I’d say it’s definitely possible to use Chinese characters for different languages.

BUT, there is certainly some pushing of a square peg in a round hole to have them fit. Maybe Taiwan can find its happy medium from one of these solutions. I certainly don’t want to learn yet another character system or romanization system for that matter.

In Korean Chinese characters have sounds and meanings roughly similar to Chinese… and not Mandarin, either. Namdaemun (nam day moon) is the large south gate, for example. In Cantonese it would be pronounced nam dai moon… and in Mandarin nan ta men. But Korea also decided on inventing an alphabet of its own to handle its language. I’ve also seen Korean words romanized, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a standard here.

The papers are usually in Korean script only. Most Koreans can’t read the Chinese bits.

Chinese characters in Japanese can either sound similar to Chinese or have a complete different Japanese pronounciation. And meanings are mostly the same as in Chinese but not always. And yet Japan has also got 2 other character systems in addition to kanji, AND a romanization system that isn’t pinyin but is reasonably simple.

Japanese signs and newspapers seem to use all character systems except romanization, which I’d prefer, ha ha.

Cantonese does use Chinese characters, but then again its grammar seems quite similar to Mandarin. But while certain characters have a one-to-one correspondence to Mandarin, just a different pronounciation, some characters in Cantonese have a completely different pronounciation and meaning in Mandarin.
When required, romanization isn’t needed as you just sneak in the English word.
However there are also a lot of Cantonese words that don’t have Mandarin equivalents. These have their own characters in a HK character set. Example, the negative mo, which is equivalent to Mandarin mei-you, is written by creatively taking away the 2 horizontal strokes in the moon character of the character you (have). There are also a lot of characters that are completely made up. I’ve never figured out how to read those.

I’ve seen Taiwanese signs which use bopomofo to represent Minan words. I confess I still haven’t memorised bopomofo and my knowledge of Hokkien isn’t very good either, so I don’t know whether it works 100%. But if it does, wouldn’t a mixture of bopomofo and Chinese characters be enough, with a few made-up characters thrown in to cover any exceptions, like in HK?

22
quote:
Originally posted by shimmers: Namdaemun (nam day moon) is the large south gate, for example. In Cantonese it would be pronounced nam dai moon.. and in Mandarin nan ta men.
You mean [i][b]nan da men[/b][/i], surely.
quote:
Originally posted by shimmers: I've seen Taiwanese signs which use "bopomofo" to represent Minan words.
I see the Taiwanese word "Ging" a lot in [i][b]Zhuyinfuhao[/b][/i] - at least once a week, and given the relatively small amount of Taiwanese TV that I watch, that's a lot.

(Remember that the PRC also teaches Bopomofo, they just do so using the roman alphabet. If you are referring to the phonetic squiggles taught in Taiwanese kindergartens, the proper nomenclature is Zhuyinfuhao).

23

Bri:

You’re making a basic mistake by not making several important distinctions.

I’ll try keep this simpler by limiting the discussion to Taiwanese and Hakka, the two dialects that the Ministry of Education would be developing character systems for. (After all, a character system for Mandarin – the character system – already exists.)

First, consider this: Everything that can be spoken can be alphabetized (i.e. expressed by using an alphabetic system). This is a basic fact of linguistics.

If something that is said can be understood, an alphebetized version of this can be similarly understood with no loss of meaning.

It is in the romanization of written language (characters) that things get complicated, because people often use one character to stand for an entire multisyllabic word whose long form would normally be used in speech and because sometimes people’s baihua isn’t sufficiently bai. The written and spoken forms of Mandarin are still somewhat divergent.

Taiwanese and Hakka, however, are even today what they have always been: basically verbal languages – tongues without standardized written forms. As such, their verbal forms are dominant. And as verbal forms, they can be alphabetized with no loss of meaning.

Chinese has many homonyms, you say. People do not speak in characters but in words that have specific sounds. English has homonyms, too, but nobody has suggested yet that characters would serve the language better. Context: It works in English, and it works in Taiwanese and Hakka.

Characters – a phenomenally complicated and archaic device millennia out of date as a close phonetic rendering of the spoken language of today – are the wrong choice for Taiwanese and Hakka.

24
quote:
Minister of Education Huang Jong-tsun yesterday said the invention of a character system for the various Chinese languages is more important than choosing a romanization spelling system for the Chinese languages in Taiwan. ...

…“The MOE has promised the Legislature to design a character system for Hoklo, Hakka, and the aboriginal languages within three years, and the current drafting of the bill will be completed in two months and submitted to the Executive Yuan for review,” he added.

Actually I too am slightly surprise that the Taiwanese govt ministry claim they need to INVENT a whole new character system for Hoklo. This must be a slight exaggeration surely. I am sure it does not mean reinvent the basic characters for the words, but just

25

[quote=“cranky laowai”]Originally posted by Mark Nagel:

[quote]“Peking” is actually the Wade Giles spelling of “Beijing”. When China started using Hanyu Pinyin instead of Wade Giles (around 1960), the rest of the world finally started pronouncing “Beijing” the right way.[/quote]The Wade-Giles way of rendering Beijing would be Pei-ching. “Peking” is the old Chinese Postal System rendering.
I don’t remember hearing “Beijing” instead of the ridiculous “Pee-KING” in the United States until the late 1970s. Until then, Taiwan – with its messed up Wade-Giles and Chinese Postal System remnants – was “China.” Perhaps the media in countries that recognized the PRC earlier (Britain, for example) caught on to proper pronunciations of Chinese much sooner than their U.S. counterparts.[/quote]

Peking came about because the translators who coined the word into English were from Canton and pronounced it Bat Geng. That’s the story I heard anyway…

26

I’m inclined to doubt that story, esp. since “Bat Geng” doesn’t look much like “Beijing” or “Peking” at all. OTOH, Robert Morrison’s extremely influential Chinese-English dictionary c. 1818 would have it “Peking.” True, he lived in Guangzhou; but his dictionary is in Mandarin.

I’ll be putting some notes on Morrison’s romanization on my new site, which should be up soon.

27

Hmmm… well if you say it quickly in Cantonese “Bat Geng” could sound a bit like “Peking” to whoever wrote it down, but anyway… Sounds absolutely nothing like “Beijing”.

The OED says: “a. F. Pekin, the Jesuit Missionaries’ spelling of the Chinese Pe-king ('pe:'king)…” 1783 etymology meaning silk stuff

So not much help there. The debate rages on…

28

Vietnamese and Thai are both tonal languages and seem to cope successfully with alphabetical writing systems. (The former even uses the Roman alphabet).

The main problem with romanisation of tonal languages is dealing with homophones. When a single word is written in Roman form it could have one of many meanings (often more than ten). A character usually has only one or two meanings hence avoiding confusion.

When words are put into sentences or context though it is usually clear what the meaning of the individual word is. For example (ignoring tones for simplicity), the Chinese word “shi” could mean many things, but put into a sentence: “Wo shi taiwanren” or “Wo zai Taibei shi”. The differences in meaning become clear. Also many words in Chinese are formed by combining two or more characters. So while “shi” could mean many things, “shiqing” or “chengshi” are less likely to cause any confusion.

A problem with using the same character set for different Chinese languages is that the grammar and word usage varies and there are additional particles, etc. In Taiwanese for example the plural form of you is a single syllable, so if you write it in the same way as Chinese then you break the one syllable, one character rule and create much confusion.

I am also studying Taiwanese at the moment. The text book I am using uses romanisation and Taiwanese written in Chinese characters. Although many of the Chinese characters are different and they even pop in the occasional romanised word. As a beginner it is easy to read the romanisation and pronounce the words correctly, but it is easier to understand the meaning of the sentence if you see it written in characters even if they aren’t exactly the same as Chinese.

For a native speaker of the language it is probably just as easy to read and understand either form (I’m not 100% sure?). I guess many people in Taiwan have learnt the Bible using romanised Taiwanese and as I mentioned at the start of my post other tonal languages successfully use alphabetical writing systems. So I guess it is entirely possible to get rid of characters and romanise the Chinese language. But the question is would the Taiwanese or Chinese people want to do so. The answer is a definite no. Chinese characters are deeply embedded in their culture and identity. Even though Japan developed an alphabet it still retained Chinese characters.

However, it is still important to discuss the best ways to romanise the various Chinese languages and also to write Chinese languages other than Mandarin in characters Chinese .

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[quote] Just Chinese Characters《福布斯》：全美富豪財產縮水 { 2002/09/18 }

近來，美國富翁們的腰包越來越癟，他們的身价已經大大地縮水了。
20年來這樣的情況一共只出現了四次，其中的兩次接連發生在去年和今年：《福布斯》雜志共排出了400名最富有的美國人，但他們的總資產淨值卻減少了。從這一點上也可以看出美國經濟中出現的一系列問題。

2000年這些富豪們的資產淨值總額為1.2万億美元，2001年則降至9460億，2002年僅為8720億。

更甚的是,連進入排名的標准也隨之降低了。2002年入圍參加排名者的個人資產至少要達到5.5億美元，而在2001年，最起碼也得有6億的家產才能被《福布斯》列入考慮之列。

盡管如此，富豪榜上的前10名仍然沒有易主，只是某些人的排名順序稍有變動而已。

由9月13日公布的這份排名來看，排名在首位的全球首富仍然是微軟公司的創始人之一比爾?蓋茨，不過他也是身价縮水最為嚴重的富豪。
他的資產淨值為430億美元，比去年"縮水"了110億。由于科技產業的泡沫逐漸走向破滅，他所持的微軟股份也難逃貶值的厄運，從2000年到現在，他的總資產共損失了200億。

而超級投資者沃倫巴菲特這次則成為了最大的贏家，他不但坐穩了排名上第二把交椅的位置，而且資產淨值還從332億增加到了360億。
排在第三位的仍然是保羅艾倫–微軟公司的另一位開國元勛，但他的資產從282億下降到210億。

已故沃爾瑪公司（Wal-Mart Stores Inc.）創辦人山姆?沃爾頓的五位家族成員同時排在了第四名的位置。得益于旺盛的市場購買力，他們每人的總資產從2001年的175億增加到188億。

美國最大的數据庫軟件制造商甲骨文公司（Oracle Corp.）的創始人拉里*埃里森 ，這次是回天乏術了，無法扭轉名次下滑的局面。在名單上的排名從2000年的第二到2001年的第四，再到今年的第九，資產總值從去年的219億直落至了現在的152億。

在這次的富豪榜上共有46位女性。其中包括石油大亨
J?保羅蓋提的三位孫女。她們于1986年分別繼承了40億財產。
400位富豪中最年輕的是30歲的丹尼爾 齊夫，他和現年非別34歲和38歲的兩個哥哥繼承了其父–IT媒體出版業巨頭威廉姆齊夫的財產，而丹尼爾獲得了其中的12億。

而榜上年齡最大的則是94歲的馬克斯*菲什，他的發家是從石油和鋼鐵開始的。他曾經說過："我并不是個億万富翁。"但其實也差不了多少，因為据《福布斯》統計，他的總資產已經達到了7.5億美元。
(中國日報网站譯)

[/quote]

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Third “Quote” in English of same article

[quote] Forbes 400 Wealthiest Lose Money {2002/09/18}

The rich are getting less rich in America. For the second straight year but only the fourth time in 20 years of rankings, the combined net worth of Forbes magazine’s 400 wealthiest Americans declined this year, reflecting the economy’s continuing troubles. Their total net worth of $872 billion was down from $946 billion in 2001 and $1.2 trillion in 2000.

Even the benchmark for being ranked dropped. The 2002 survey included individuals with a minimum net worth of $550 million - down from the required $600 million in 2001. The top 10 remained the same, with some reshuffling of the order.

The biggest loser on the list released Friday was also the richest person: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Gates lost $11 billion for a net worth of $43 billiin. He now has lost $20 billion since the tech meltdown began in 2000, due largely to the drop in value of his Microsoft shares.

The biggest winner was investor Warren Buffett, who remained No. 2 on the list. His net worth increased - to $36 billion from $33.2 billion.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also maintained his ranking - third - but saw his net worth fall to $21 billion from $28.2 billion.

Five relatives of the late Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., tied for fourth. Their net worth increased to $18.8 billion each from $17.5 billion in 2001, thanks to strong consumer spending.

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, who fell from second in 2000 to fourth in 2001, dropped to ninth this year. He’s now worth $15.2 billion, down from $21.9 billion last year.

Forty-six women made the list, including the three granddaughters of oilman J. Paul Getty. They each inherited $400 million in 1986.

The youngest among the 400 was 30-year-old Daniel Ziff, who shares a $1.2 billion inheritance from his father William Ziff Jr. with his two brothers, ages 34 and 38.

The oldest person on the survey is 94-year-old Max Fisher, who made his fortune in oil and steel. “I’m not a billionaire,” he said. But he’s not that far from it, according to Forbes, with a net worth of $750 million.
(Agencies)

[/quote]

I am just trying to show that “hanyu pinyin” does not work well enough, as a clear or easy to read form of written communication. Too many “words” are of the same spelling /sound {homophones} yet the underlying meaning is vastly different. Once the passage becomes more complicated than a dialogue it gets very hard to decipher the meaning of each sound. One should also know that newspaper writings or formal writings/prose have slightly different grammar or word order than normal “speech”. Consequently I much prefer the Chinese characters as the meaning practically “jumps” right out at you.

In reply to a question raised above: Peking - English for the capital of China { pronounced “PeeKing” }- is entirely different in sound from “Put-Kain" , the equivalent of Beijing/Peking in Cantonese. The "P” is pronounced more like a “B” as in “but”.

:slight_smile:

31

Why the insistence on characters? Because the Taiwanese, for all their talk of localization, are at bottom Han chauvinists (to use an old PRC term which is out of date now that they no longer oppose the practice) more than they are Taiwanese nationalists. Therefore they enjoy the project of subsuming other people’s languages to their own. Characters are an utterly inefficient writing system, but a potent ethno-national symbol.

The purpose of TongYong, meanwhile, it to have an alternative to the apparently politically-unacceptable mainland pinyin. The subtext is that the authorities would like to remain independent of the mainland, but are proud of the island’s domination by Han Chinese. TongYong is for foreigners, they’d never permit it a true alphabetic medium to gain vogue for any Chinese subject language (my gloss on “dialect”).

I note that none of their various language projects have solicited the involvement, let alone the leadership, of either reputable linguists or representatives the speech communities concerned. Rather such decisions seem to be made on the basis of politics and cronyism.

As an aside, I think it would be wise for Taiwanese to phase in the teaching of simplified characters. Not simply with a view to being conquered by the mainland, but because that’s the direction of book publishing in the future.

32

So with 13000 traditional characters and 7000 simple characters - does the language lose something?

33

As I and others noted earlier, words are what matter, not broken-up syllables. Here’s an excerpt from Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma, by William Hannas.

[quote]One of the most commonly cited – and misunderstood – justifications for Chinese characters is that they “eliminate” the so-called homonym problem in Chinese and the Sinitic lexicon in general. The thesis runs as follows: Chinese and Chinese-based vocabulary, more than that of other languages, include many words that sound the same. … Fortunately, Chinese characters, being tied to meaning, are available to disambiguate this phonetic homogeneity…

Plausible as this argument sounds, the statistics and rationale behind it as it applies to Chinese are spurious, and I include it here only because it is raised so often in the procharacter literature by East Asians who do not distinguish morphemes from words, and by nonspecialists in the West who accept their arguments at face value. The usual ploy is to consult the index of a large character dictionary, note the number of single-character entries under a given syllable

34

That is a question, not the question – not here, at least. Romanization has been the dominant form for writing Taiwanese, so this isn’t a question of getting rid of characters. The question is why use the world’s most complicated and difficult writing system for a language isn’t not designed for when far, far easier and more efficient romanization systems could do – and has been doing – a better job. Using characters for Hokkien, Hakka, and the languages of Taiwan’s tribes should be called Project Procrustes.

Consider how much effort is needed to learn characters. Compare this with the effort needed to learn a romanization system. Chinese characters are a Rube Goldberg device – a beautiful one, to be sure, but a fundamentally over-complicated and inefficient system nonetheless.

Mainly because of snob appeal, not because it was a good idea.

[quote]However, it is still important to discuss the best ways to romanise the various Chinese languages and also to write Chinese languages other than Mandarin in characters Chinese.[/quote]Discuss it, sure – but have a real discussion, including the possibility – which I consider an absolute certainty – that characters would not be the best approach to writing Hakka and Taiwanese. Let the discussion take the form of science, not prejudice and myth, with linguistic knowledge counting for more than force of habit. The government has made no effort to hold a real discussion; and, for all the good intentions, the Hakka and Hokkien languages (I’m not going to call them dialects any more) will suffer for it.

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As I and others noted earlier, words are what matter, not broken-up syllables. [/quote]

I know some people truely believe Chinese can be romanized. We just need a little help from them romanize the following story. :wink:

chinapage.com/shi.gif

If you have some difficulty, please reference the following page.

chinapage.com/chao.html

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Do any of you have a book published I think by Princeton University which contains a series of essays by eminent Chinese scholars on the subject of characters and romanisation ? It was a large but thinnish blue book - I had it at uni but have lost it. I think it contained the essays in long form and short form characters, and I am not sure if it had English translations. The essays come from around the time bai hua was becoming the written standard Chinese, instead of wen yan wen. As well as the diglossia issue it touched upon doing away with Chinese characters altogether. Can’t remember the name of it.

[found the reference Advanced Reader of Modern Chinese: China’s Own Critics, Princeton University Press, 2 vols, 1993, ISBN: 0691000697. Featuring Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Hu Shi, Lu Xun (I think), Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, amongst others]

The newspaper reading classes at the MTC used to be good - if you got the right teacher (wasn’t that always the way?!)

37

Short answer: Apparently yes!

To be able to encompass all the different place names found in China/Hong Kong today, plus dialect variants (e.g. special Cantonese only terms, or Shanghainese, or other dialects.) and special terms in various specialised fields such as: law, Chinese medicine, Buddhism, Taoism, etc; sciences like botany, astronomy etc, these 13,000 traditional Big5 characters is just NOT sufficient. Not to belabour this point, even the HK government has its own preferred terms/characters for use generally or only within the civil service for administration purposes!

Since HK uses traditional characters most of the time i.e. the pool to draw from is the 13,000 Big5 encoding pool, HK Government has had to add a further 3,500 GCS characters to this 13,000 pool list (and I might add here, after a very long deliberation by experts of what to leave out!) just to ensure that all the important characters ‘in daily use’ are available in Big5 encoding and no work stoppages occur as a result of being unable to type a certain character! So 13,000 + 3,500 (= 16,500) represents the bare minimum of traditional character list for daily use in Hong Kong.

China within the computing world (at least) has managed to keep to its 7000 characters (GuoBiao GB) encoded listing. Much of this list is really a repeat of the traditional character list because the total population of simplified characters is only around 600 characters at most. Actually there are not that many ‘simplified’ characters.

With the advent of Unicode, or double-byte encoding listing, it would be possible to specify a home for the remaining rarely used characters from the KangXi dictionary- supposedly the complete lexicon of all Chinese dictionaries and effectively ‘combine’ all the characters in the preceding two encoding forms i.e. Big5 list and the GB list. Thus one is no longer hampered by technology once Unicode is use and can show the whole lexicon of Chinese characters when required. I am told in total there is suppose to be about 50 or some 60 thousand traditional characters in this dictionary.

I would say in practice about 5000 traditional characters would be more than sufficient for most everyday things, But since place names, special terms in specialised fields creep up from time to time even in such everyday encounters as a newspaper or the MTR; and one must invariably also be able to enter them into computers etc, in our communication, in summary, the total effective ‘working population’ of Chinese characters should still be at least the original 13,000 plus the 3500 specified by the HK Government plus all the list of simplified characters in use just in case one needs to show something to someone in simplified form. So without ‘repetition’ this is around 17,000 characters!

  1. :slight_smile: :smiley:
38

One of basic limitations with any form of pinyinisation system, such as hanyu pinyin, is that such systems are primarily designed to impart or mimic the sound of each morpheme and not the word.

Pinyin was not designed ‘to carry’ much meaning. The meaning has to be derived from context and by experience of combining the various morphemes into proper meaningful words. Such ‘derived’ meanings would still be confusing or difficult to obtain as pointed out earlier, if the morphemes are frequently spelled identically, as in homonyms.

The problem of too many homonyms in Mandarin Chinese or Putonghua has been pointed out more than once in this thread. A possible solution to MINIMISE such confusion would be to write pinyin in such a way as to aid the reader in deciding or deciphering which of the basic morphemes (pinyin syllables) ‘add up’ to a word and which are already proper words or meaning by themselves.

e.g.
Instead of writing this :
— wo de peng you jin tian sheng bing le.
We can conceivably write :
---- wo de pengyou jintian sheng bing le.

Since most Chinese words are bi-syllabic and rarely monosyllabic as quite correctly pointed out by our moderator Cranky Laowai, pinyin written in this way could conceivably go some way towards reducing such deciphering confusion.

Also depending upon the dialect being pinyinised, the frequency of homonyms occurring may be much less than in standard Mandarin/Putonghua. e.g. Cantonese or most southern dialects I would say from experience have far more ’ basic tonal variation ’ than Mandarin or uses more varying combinations of ’ initials’ and ’ finals’ to spell its morphemes.

In theory, the greater the number of possible combinations of morpheme ‘spellings’ , the lesser ( then ) the chance of ‘homonyms’ frequenting or causing confusion.

With the above I am again implying that pinyinisation can certainly replace Chinese characters when the sentences are fairly straightforward, for example as in dialogues.

As mentioned before, by myself and others many more problems arise when pinyinisation is used to replace more formal prose: newspaper script, cooking recipes, medicinal prescriptions, poetry, Chinese literature, the

39

Let

40

Note: I think there are 2 posters being quoted, and I can’t quite work out who’s who, so please don’t take offense if you are misattributed!!

[quote=“drambuie”]Let抯 just take one area which ‘graphical characters’ or graphic languages like Chinesee are better at doing […] the formation of new words or new concepts.

[…]Chinese characters or different ‘pictures’ are combined to form the new word. Here the meaning of the resulting ‘compound’ can be quite obvious or there is usually a relationship between the old parts and the new whole. {Empirical studies show that most Chinese words are ‘logical’ or meaningful compound characters }
[/quote]

Yes, but many are just ‘quaint’ (example: sha1yan3 ‘sand eyes’ for ‘trachoma’), and do not really give any constructive hint as to the true meaning. Many words which are adopted or created in languages these days are in the sci-tech field, and I don’t see any particularly high standard of rigor for giving ‘hints’ as to the meaning. You can argue that this gives ‘more’ indication than a phonetic script, but I doubt the difference would be statistically significant.

Unfortuantely you seem to be taking the typical foreigner viewpoint of considering tone to be completely separate from phonetics. While tone is not a segmental phonetic feature, it IS an inherent part of each syllable on the suprasegmental level, and it cannot be ignored when determining how many homophones you are dealing with.

Pick up a copy of Lanbridge’s excellent (and fun for radio or TV watching/listening) “Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary” and run your finger down any random column. You’ll immediately have to give up the comforting excuses about ‘I haven’t really learned Chinese because of all those darned homophone words.’ There just aren’t that many.

This does not add to the problem, it alleviates the ‘problem’ you seem to perceive. Tone is an integral part of each Chinese syllable and/or word. Any spelling system which does not consider tone is inadequate for the needs of Romanizing Chinese adequately. (Which is, of course, why everyone should adopt TOP Romanization, or its Minnan companion TOT, but I digress. :laughing: )

Just go down to the "taiwan e tiam’ store on Hsinsheng S. Road just up from the McDonald’s across from Taida (it’s in one of those little alleys, but fairly easy to spot from Hsinsheng). Full of books written mostly in Church Romanization (the standard romanization system used most often for Taiwanese). Taiwanese books can also be written in characters, or mostly in characters with a few Romanized words. I was once reading one such book by Robert Cheng (a guy formerly at U Hawaii who writes about Taiwanese linguistics issues) on a plane and the Chinese man beside me just couldn’t quite figure it out…kept popping his head over to see why he couldn’t quite read it!

[quote]I know that the pinyinisation of Cantonese using the English alphabet is abyssmal. I mean it is terribly terribly inaccurate. (Hanyu pinyin and Zhuyun FuHao is the most accurate systems of transliteration I have come across) A beginner can spend two years at say the Chinese University of Hong Kong learning to speak and read Cantonese using say the Yale system of pinyinsation for Cantonese. At the end of these two years his pronunciation is still quite laughfable. And imagine this he is still fully in a native speaking environment!
[/quote]
Skill at pronunciation has little to do with the system of Romanization (or bopomofo!) used. It has everything to do with the method of teaching employed. Most people do not just ‘pick up’ correct pronunciation from being in a Cantonese speaking environment; they are not yet able to deal overtly with those features. You don’t learn to play piano by listening to CDs, either, at least not at the beginning levels. Later judicious listening will help the student to build his style. :slight_smile:
Don’t even get me started on the backwardness of Chinese language teaching techniques…