Mnemonics and Bopomofo

Language Learning Chinese
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For me, bopomofo allowed me to get rid of any thought of English when I was first learning Mandarin: Just forget about English, this is a new language with its own pronunciation, was roughly the thought process during this initial period.

This is very difficult to do when something is written using English letters.

Now, I’m just very used to bopomofo and find it handy to type things out on my phone. But I guess pinyin would be easy too after getting used to it.

Edit: When I went to school with Japanese and Korean students, I found that their pronunciation was pretty bad (almost always worse than students from Western countries). I think one reason is the way their languages are set up (you need to have a vowel sound following a consonant sound always, for example). But I believe another reason is that they can never get away from their own language when learning Mandarin.

To give an example, saying “society” uses the same Chinese characters in the three languages. So when a Korean says “社會” I can very clearly hear that he or she is thinking of that word in Korean. This is related to the point I was making above.

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The whole thing of “forgetting about English” has to do with how you are taught Chinese.

If you are taught traditionally, of COURSE you will fall back on the language(s) you already know in trying to make the new sounds. That’s what human brains do. You are generally presented with written forms representing new sounds, so you read them the best you can. And in many cases, you just keep doing that because telling you to say it a different way doesn’t stick. Google error correction and its (in)effectiveness in language teaching if you like.

On the other hand, if you have a teacher who floods you with understandable language, you hear those sounds over and over, and you are not asked to produce them until they “fall out of your mouth”. That will happen, sometimes with a small amount of judicious direct instruction like “the x is the happy sh sound – big grin – the SH is the serious one, swallow your tongue when you say it”. But overall, including tones, students get them when they hear them so much that they just sound right. I’d far rather have a student who says things because they sound right than one who has to stop and think about a bunch of rules and then still says things wrong.

If you have this input flood, it really doesn’t matter whether the lesson uses Pinyin, Bopomofo, Cyrillic, or whatever. When we read we want the eyes to just remind the brain of sounds that are already in the brain. “Reading” a new word in romanized form (or bopomofo) is the same. It shouldn’t be painfully putting together the sounds into a word. It needs to be showing the student one way of writing the word they already know. Same thing goes with character reading for beginners. It’s why we don’t need to have Pinyin around characters – the sounds in the brain inform the eye as to what it’s seeing, because the message sounds right and makes sense.

Bopomofo is great for getting pronunciations from Taiwanese people, though. It’s worth memorizing those symbols for that reasons – but no need to do it at the beginning, before you even know any of the language. I always cringed hearing the “pronunciation classes” at TLI years ago. The guy who taught Taiwanese was audible across three floors of the building, just saying syllables over and over. I doubt much has changed in terms of insisting on a “pronunciation class” first, though.

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My point is that it’s very difficult to forget about English as a native English speaker when looking at English letters. To give you an example, the menu at McDonald’s in Korea is full of English words that have been formed using Hangul (the Korean phonetic alphabet). It’s nearly impossible for me to order a big mac, french fries, a coke, and an apple pie without giving away my Americanness (even though I’m half Korean and pronunciation otherwise in Korean is no problem).

I think there’s a huge advantage to pronunciation (especially at the beginning) if bopomofo is used. Since it takes 3-4 weeks to learn this writing system (two weeks to be able to read it), I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to learn bopomofo. It seems like a no-brainer to me.

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Because I learned pinyin in 3 to 4 hours (or less), and people regularly compliment my pronunciation. I don’t find using the English letters as a starting point to be confusing, and when I speak I try to speak Chinese like a Chinese speaker.

Everyone is different. If bopomofo works for you, shine on :smiley:

If someone asked me which I recommended, I suppose it would depend on their goals and context. If the goal is to be communicative quickly in an immersive environment, pinyin.

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Yeah, everyone is different. I actually hate pinyin, if I’m honest! At church, the powerpoint for the Chinese songs has Chinese characters and pinyin. I steal a look at pinyin when I’m stumped on a character, but then quickly look back at the Chinese characters when we’re past that difficult character. Just hate it!

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The Romans “shared” their alphabet with a pretty good chunk of the world. Of the languages someone from the West is likely to learn, I can think of three that don’t use a Roman/Latin script. In the Americas, is there a modern language other than Cherokee with a written system that isn’t the Latin alphabet? In Europe, outside of languages that use Greek and Cyrillic, every other language has a Latin script. Most of Africa uses a Latin script too (though northern Africa uses Arabic). The Pacific Islands with written language all use Latin. That leaves a few countries/languages in Asia to “not have interference” from.

The reality is that if you focus on listening and comprehensible input, you’re not going to sound American. I know plenty of people who learned Chinese from Zhuyin who sound incredibly American with their Chinese. I learned strictly from pinyin and I sound very fluent.

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The root of “Pinyin accent” is interference from the native language, but it’s not caused by the fact that Pinyin and, say, English use the same character set. Rather it’s caused by the nature of the reading.

When you read English (as a fluent reader) you are not sounding out each and every word. You are being “reminded” of language that already exists in your head and makes sense to you immediately in the order it’s presented. Often people only glance at the shape of the word, not all its letters. You’ve seen those Internet memes with paragraphs with letters replaced with numbers and stuff like that, and they’re still very readable to a fluent reader.

Pinyin is not generally used that way. In legacy teaching methods, Pinyin is used to teach how to pronounce words that are not yet known. The sound of the word isn’t there in the brain waiting to be quickly matched to the visual form. Rather, the Pinyin word is (often painfully) sounded out. Non-fluent speakers who don’t have the “Chinese voice” in their heads already don’t have a reliable set of Chinese sounds to attach to those Pinyin letters and combinations (like -an, etc.) When the brain comes up short on authentic sounds to use, it falls back on sounds it’s matched to those letters before (English, or really any language using the Roman alphabet that the student reads well or not).

A student taught with comprehensible input doesn’t have to sound out Pinyin, because (in class, during the period they’re learning to read Pinyin gradually, not through dense direct instruction) they never have to read Pinyin alone. If my students see Pinyin, they are either hearing that word simultaneously from me (I point to each one as I say it) or the Pinyin corresponds to words they have already heard literally hundreds of times before. Their built-in “Chinese voice” also “suggests” what the word probably is through context. These things don’t happen with legacy-taught students because they don’t hear enough understandable Chinese to build that voice.

This is also how we teach students to read characters without having Pinyin involved. I use Pinyin for oral input and to make lists and notes for students, but when they read, they only see characters, right from the first day, because the “Chinese voice” is sufficiently strong to let their ears inform their eyes as to what words those squiggles are. I know it’s strong enough for a very simple reason: I don’t have a class or student read until their response to the spoken language included in the reading is strong and immediate.

As time goes on obviously students encounter more words and read more complicated things, but the crucial period is the first, say, 50 hours of instruction. That’s when you make a reader. And it’s also when you build a user of Pinyin who uses it automatically to arrive at the correct sounds.

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Hmmmm. I may need to adjust my points a bit. Thinking about the discussion this morning made me think about aboriginal songs I know, like the one embedded below. There are English letters, but I am no longer thinking of the letters as an American speaker of English. I am thinking of the letters as a foreign language. But this didn’t happen automatically and definitely not in the beginning. But it was a transition that took place over time as I practiced these songs. I would submit that people who use pinyin go through such a transition of no longer thinking of the English letters in the way they thought of them previously (for example, as a native speaker of English from Australia).

Is there any advantage then of using bopomofo over pinyin? I would say “no” now actually after giving this some thought. Probably the time used to go through such a transition in the mind is no longer than or perhaps even shorter than the time it takes to learn zhuyin (or however that’s spelled out!). Personally, as someone living in Taiwan, I’m glad I learned bopomofo.

Sound reasonable to me.

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Ok, as someone who grew up with bopomofo, I’m going to say that since it doesn’t function as a writing system, except for stupid internet fads that is pretty much dead now anyway, it’s not worth learning.

All half decent phonetic notation can serve that task equally well. So to have to learn a brand new sets of characters and can’t even really write with it is just a waste of time.

What will fix an accent is more audio input, and attempts to repeat what you’ve heard as closely as possible over and over again.

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Bopomofo might not be worth learning as an aid to improve accent over Pinyin, but it has value in Taiwan because everyone knows it. Fastest way to get a mostly-accurate pronunciation out of someone is to ask them to write the bopomofo. Even if they don’t pronounce all the consonants, they mostly write them in bopomofo.

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I’m noticing some mental interference when a word inherently has a directional meaning, but the tone contour contradicts that directional meaning.

For example, 上樓 means to go upstairs, but the tone of 上 is the falling tone.

Similarly, 低 means low, but the tone of 低 is the high tone.

The problem manifests itself as speaking the word with the wrong tone; the mental image of “going up” sometimes causes me to speak 上 with the rising tone; the mental image of being low down causes me to speak 低 with the low tone.

Resolving the contradiction takes some mental effort. For example with 上樓, one strategy is just to repeat saying the word over and over again with the correct falling tone on 上, while using a head gesture pointing upwards to correspond to the meaning of going up the stairs. Another strategy is to mentally focus on the image of the first character 上, and to repeat saying that word over and over with the correct tone while visualizing the image of the character, which visually can easily be understood to mean going up.

In other words, in cases where there’s a conflict between the direction of the tone contour and the direction inherent in the word’s meaning, I try to resolve the conflict by focusing on remembering the semantic direction in the meaning by whatever means (including gestures or visualization of the character), and separately try to learn the tone by rote instead of by gestures.

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Are there many words with this kind of conflict? :thinking:

But l agree, there are conflicts for foreigners when it comes to tones. In English, if you yell „Stop!“ you do it in what in Mandarin would be the fourth tone, but the word 停 has the second tone. Yell „ting“ in the fourth tone and people might listen, but not stop. :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

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平 is another one for me. The implication of flatness in the meaning wrongly short-circuits my brain into thinking that the tone is the flat, even, first tone. Even as I write this, I can feel that false logic taking hold in my brain. Must stop. Now I am trying to visualize an arrow shot up into the air (rising tone), landing flat (corresponding to the meaning) on a high-up open stretch of grass.

As for 低, and its high tone contradicting the meaning of “low”, I was only able to remember this by visualizing a gymnast hanging from a hole in the ceiling of his apartment (the high tone corresponding to the high ceiling), but the apartment ceiling is also the low floor (corresponding to the meaning of “low”) of the tenant living above.

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For me it works better to look at a character and try to find any feature that relates to the tone.

In the case of 低, I’d look at the horizontal line at the bottom and say to myself, “that low line is really flat, hence the tone must be the first one.”