You don’t have to do what Taiwanese people do. You can text with pinyin just fine.
You’ll only need to learn bopomofo if you think you will read Taiwanese primary school text books at some point. That’s pretty much the only place it’s found.
This happens to native Chinese speakers too, especially since nobody really writes anymore.
The way we used to learn characters in primary school was to just write it like 100 times and fill up the whole page, but this won’t do you much good if you’re just going to keep typing most of the time in real-life usage.
Just a few more cents here: I learned bopomofo and it was very useful to me, for learning in language exchanges or from strangers in bars, etc. I carried a little notebook and when something interesting came up that I wanted to be taught, I had the person write the character (slowly and clearly) and the bopomofo … without that, you could pick up words but not learn how to correctly pronounce them. I’ve never met a local who knew pinyin, I’m not sure who I would ever text using pinyin since anyone I’ve met who knows pinyin could probably handle my text in English.
As far as remembering Chinese characters, at one point I had that series Fun with Chinese Characters; and I spent some hours writing the most common characters over and over. But like most I’ve forgotten how to physically write almost all of it, except my address and even that fades if I don’t write it for several months. Last week I had to fill out a form and couldn’t recall how to write a character in my wife’s name (yikes); so I gave it my best shot and wrote the bopomofo next to it, and the person decoded it easily.
I think Hayashi meant texting in Chinese characters, but that Taiwanese people use bopomofo instead of pinyin to generate those characters. Why would they text pinyin or bopomofo?
You can enter pinyin into the phone to generate characters, easier
The obvious advantage for pinyin for people who use a roman alphabet is that you can learn it very quickly. If the issues are difficulty remembering and being functionally proficient, it is a very efficient solution.
I understand it is unpopular here because of the association with communist China, but it is still very useful and widely used globally
Listening even easier. I almost regret learning it , now I can understand the world around me.
Well I didn’t really learn it I aquired it , but yeah the writing I use pinyin .
There are some ways to help. Like for example if you ride the mrt daily remember the Chinese characters for each stop. If you ride the subway 200 times a year that alone helps. Then you could try road names …
If you’re learning new words from a local, wouldn’t you just listen to how they are pronouncing it? And then you can jot it down in either pinyin or bopomofo, whichever you prefer.
YES! Me too.
@Hayashi if you’re concerned about forgetting Chinese characters, then you should be even more concerned about forgetting bopomofo. It’s used much less than actual characters.
Sounds like time well spent. I didn’t use pinyin for the better part of 2 decades, but when I moved to Taiwan I hadn’t forgotten it. Not because of my great memory, but because it uses my first language alphabet
Well if you look at the whole context, I was talking about language exchanges and learning from strangers in bars; from locals; who don’t know pinyin. I was simply giving one reason learning bopomofo was useful, for me. I’m not trying to argue that learning pinyin is bad, or inferior, or useless, etc.
Lots of people have non-standard pronunciation and I found that if I just tried to mimic their pronunciation it was harder to make myself understood. I had a tutor for a few months who really drilled me in bopomofo and getting the standard pronunciation right, so if I knew the bopomofo I could pronounce things pretty standard … which is not always how people actually talk, but I found they could understand me better if I went standard over non-standard.
Same with me. I learned pinyin and bopomofo at roughly the same time (elementary/junior high). Didn’t actually start using either in real life until I was well into adulthood and got a smart phone.
Guess which one I forgot completely and which one I still remembered?
Yeah, well it wasn’t about trying to learn and speak ‘the King’s English’, my main goal was to be understood. Especially for slangy stuff learned in (loud) bars, if I went purely with my ear I would end up trying to say things and getting funny looks, Wtf is this guy trying to say?
Yeah that’s what I thought, and what I tried for a while, but as I said in the end I found people understood me better if I stuck closer to standard than to ‘what my ear heard’.
I think it’s kind of like the old saw, learn the rules first so you know what rules you’re breaking. These days I talk like other people talk, but if I’m not being understood it’s good to be able to fall back on standard, which people seem to get even if they don’t talk that way.
