multilingual! sensible. then the aboriginal names can be read by Roman alphabet users too.
Does that mean I am forced to change all the names on my documents to hanyu pinyin!? That better not happen cus it’ll put me through a bunch of troubles with my overseas diploma, certificates, and financial accounts!!! :raspberry:
I do wonder what they’ll do with names of long time institutions. In China, “Beijing University” is still called Peking University in English. Also, “Cinghua University” continues to use the old romanization of Tsinghua University. Of course, there are others still, such as Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, that have retained the old spelling instead of taking on the new. Interestingly, some newer universities, such as Yangtze University in Hubei (est. 2003) decided to go with an old romanized name right off the bat instead of following Hanyu Pinyin, which would have made the school name Changjiang University.
Some lesser known universities had a hard time making up its mind. Jiangnan University, for example, started out calling itself as South Yangtze University but decided to rename itself using Pinyin. The Chinese name remained the same, however.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in Taiwan.
Unsurprisingly, the Taiwan News has come out (again) against Hanyu Pinyin: Pinyin move hurts Taiwan’s pluralism.
Although this editorial isn’t as hilariously inept as the one several years ago – apparently now removed from the Web – announcing that paper’s adoption of Tongyong (which never really happened in practice), it still has more than its share of errors and nonsense.
If the Chen administration hadn’t been so fixated on its futile, counterproductive proxy battle of imposing Tongyong Pinyin for Mandarin it might have managed to get some real work done on reading and writing Hoklo. Instead, it squandered its opportunity. :fume:
Getting rid of Tongyong is like being cured from athlete’s foot. While it was there it wasn’t really dangerous to one’s health or anything, but it was a nuisance and a time-waster. I think most editors and translators will agree that using Hanyu is just easier. No more worrying about forgetting an “h” in “cih”, or an “o” in “liou”, or an “e” in “shuei” or a “y” in “cyuan”. Why make it more complicated than necessary?
Good riddance.
It’s not an inherently superior system but learning it allows one access to the entire catelogue of reading materials created for young Taiwanese learners. Learn only HP and you are stuck reading text books until you have acquired a couple thousand characters. (Or painfully work your way through a native text with a dictionary.)
In any case, on topic, this switchover to HP means I have to change all the frickin LP maps - again!
At least you won’t have to worry about that so much in subsequent editions!!
At least you won’t have to worry about that so much in subsequent editions!![/quote]
Want to place a bet on that? Future editions will entail correcting the street names that will be mispelled during the upcoming research time. Unless we just take the approach in the China guides and write names as they should be spelled,and not as they may appear after local governments have hired unemplyed lead sniffers to paint new street signs.
I think that’s the way to go!
[quote=“Mucha Man”][quote=“Feiren”]
It’s not an inherently superior system but learning it allows one access to the entire catelogue of reading materials created for young Taiwanese learners. Learn only HP and you are stuck reading text books until you have acquired a couple thousand characters. (Or painfully work your way through a native text with a dictionary.)
[/quote][/quote]
My only argument against Zhuyin fuhao is its alleged inherent superiority in teaching pronunciation. I also see it as the first step down the road of teaching people to read Chinese rather than speak.
But it is an invaluable tool for people learning Chinese in Taiwan–especially when learning to read. Looking characters up by radical in dictionaries is a horrible waste of time and makes things far more difficult than they have to be. Another advantage is that you can ask people how to spell words that you hear in Zhuyin fuhao so that you can then go look them up in a dictionary sensibly ordered by HP. People who have studied Chinese for a year or two overseas should immediately learn Zhuyin after arriving in Taiwan.
I also think people may not be aware of just how extensive the reading materials annotated with Zhuyin really are. My literary Chinese teacher many years ago alerted me to a series of multipage pamphlets published by Guoyuribao with hundreds if not thousands of classical essays beautifully annotated. About a decade ago, a Taiwanese publisher had a great series of the classics all sensibly done in Zhuyin fuhao–Lunyu, Shiji, Shishuo Xinyu etc.
It’s not an inherently superior system but learning it allows one access to the entire catelogue of reading materials created for young Taiwanese learners. Learn only HP and you are stuck reading text books until you have acquired a couple thousand characters. (Or painfully work your way through a native text with a dictionary.)
In any case, on topic, this switchover to HP means I have to change all the frickin LP maps - again![/quote]
I agree with you completely. This is the reason why I decided to go with Zhuyin instead of pinyin when I started learning Chinese. No Chinese teacher ever tried to convince me it was superior to pinyin, and in my experience most wanted to use pinyin until they realised I knew Zhuyin. Now, studying at Cheng Da, they don’t even use Zhuyin.
For street signs etc, I would think Pinyin would be best, because not everyone is or is planning to study Zhuyin, let alone Chinese. However, for me personally, Zhuyin is superior in learning pronounciation, but that may just be because it was the system I started learning Chinese with. But I’ll stick to it, because I like it, and it affords me a much wider range of reading materials, including newspapers for young learners.
[quote=“Feiren”][quote=“Muzha Man”][quote=“Feiren”]
It’s not an inherently superior system but learning it allows one access to the entire catelogue of reading materials created for young Taiwanese learners. Learn only HP and you are stuck reading text books until you have acquired a couple thousand characters. (Or painfully work your way through a native text with a dictionary.)
[/quote][/quote]
My only argument against Zhuyin fuhao is its alleged inherent superiority in teaching pronunciation. I also see it as the first step down the road of teaching people to read Chinese rather than speak.
But it is an invaluable tool for people learning Chinese in Taiwan–especially when learning to read. Looking characters up by radical in dictionaries is a horrible waste of time and makes things far more difficult than they have to be. Another advantage is that you can ask people how to spell words that you hear in Zhuyin fuhao so that you can then go look them up in a dictionary sensibly ordered by HP. People who have studied Chinese for a year or two overseas should immediately learn Zhuyin after arriving in Taiwan.
I also think people may not be aware of just how extensive the reading materials annotated with Zhuyin really are. My literary Chinese teacher many years ago alerted me to a series of multipage pamphlets published by Guoyuribao with hundreds if not thousands of classical essays beautifully annotated. About a decade ago, a Taiwanese publisher had a great series of the classics all sensibly done in Zhuyin fuhao–Lunyu, Shiji, Shishuo Xinyu etc.[/quote]
Another good post. People learning Chinese in China may be better served learning Pinyin, but if you’re living and learning the language in Taiwan, Zhuyin is the way to go. Having learnt Zhuyin, I have no problem with pinyin anyway, if I had only learnt pinyin, Zhuyin would just be an unintelligible scramble of scratchings and I would have restricted my reading sources.
And the point you make about dictionaries is very true. However, the 中文字譜, has a zhuyin, radical, pinyin and english reference. This is a pretty good dictionary, especially for learning characters, and should be available in most bookstores. For those who don’t know it, check it out at : zhongwen.com/
Apart from that, how would you type anything in Chinese on a computer in Taiwan without zhuyin? Sure you could use the radical systems etc…but they seem pretty much unintelligible to me.
[quote=“bismarck”]Apart from that, how would you type anything in Chinese on a computer in Taiwan without zhuyin? Sure you could use the radical systems etc…but they seem pretty much unintelligible to me.[/quote]What do you mean? A public computer in a library or something? Of course there’s no problem getting Pinyin input on your own computers.
How? What program? With windows I only have zhuyin and the other radical methods…
How? What program? With windows I only have zhuyin and the other radical methods…[/quote]
It’s built into XP and Vista. You just have to enable it. Try this (link courtesy of Taffy):
pinyinjoe.com/pinyin/pinyin_setup.htm
I love Windows’ Pinyin Input. It’s intelligent, so it guesses the characters you intend to input.
I’d hate to have to rely on Zhuyin for input: left middle right…left middle right…
Yep, hell even I can type Chinese using pinyin on my computer. Slow, but simple.
[quote=“Bismarck”]
How? What program? With windows I only have zhuyin and the other radical methods…[/quote]
[quote=“joesax”]
It’s built into XP and Vista. You just have to enable it. Try this (link courtesy of Taffy):
pinyinjoe.com/Pinyin/pinyin_setup.htm[/quote]
我很高興!!! 又容易又快!!!
I went to the page and set the pinyin. Damn!! It’s much quicker than looking for flippin zhuyin characters all the time, and it helps you find the character if you’re not sure of the tone!! Awesome!
Thanks, Joesax and Taffy!! 
:bravo:
Although, in Taiwan, zhuyin is still a major asset for reading and getting someone to write down how a character is pronounced. The average Taiwanese is pretty much pinyin illeterate!
Yes, typing in Pinyin is far easier than typing in zhuyinfuhao since you probably already know the keyboard. The same lesson applies in general. Why learn a whole new set of symbols when the sounds of Mandarin can be accurately represented by a set of symbols you already know? Adding Zhuyinfuhao just adds a a layer of complexity for most students in the beginning that is unnecessary.
Of course all serious students of Mandarin should learn zhuyinfuhao. But not in the beginning.
A “pretty good dictionary” should have good definitions, and if it provides etymological info, that should be accurate. The 中文字譜 fails on the first criterion, and is utterly abysmal (no, wait! make that [color=#BF0040]HORRIFYINGLY [/color]inaccurate) on the second. I’ve said it before, but I think it bears repeating, each time this little amateur creation is recommended.
If one is going to look up characters using pinyin or bopomofo or bushou, there are much better dictionaries. The only things it’s good for (and quite good, at that) are looking characters up by graphic components, especially the non-bushou portion, and learning what the non-bushou components are.
I still don’t see it as THE way to go. I think it’s a valuable tool to pick up, but taking notes in pinyin and looking things up in pinyin is so much faster that I think it’s the way to go even if one is in Taiwan.