With the exception of anything by Krashen or his supporters.[/quote]
Even he wouldn’t say we are the same as babies. He still emphasizes interaction/natural communication.[/quote]
Perhaps he wouldn’t say we are the same as babies, but he would probably say that adult language acquisition is a subconcious process not unlike the way a child learns language.
At the moment I neither totally agree nor totally disagree with him. I’m still thinking about it.
I think the idea that pinyin causes errors is a common misconception among local teachers. If we bought into that logic, then we wouldn’t be able to learn Spanish, German or any other language that also uses the ABC alphabet properly either.
If you’re happy with it and it works for you, great! 
My other comments below should not be taken as criticism of your choice.
[quote]The biggest problem with westerners using the pinyin system to learn is that we have a clear ingrained sense of what sound each letter represents in our own mother tongue. A very simple example is the difference between the sounds represented by the letters b and p. In English the difference between the two is that one is voiced at its onset and other is voiceless. In Chinese, however, the difference between the two sounds is that the p sound is plosive, and the sound represented by the symbol “b” is not.
What makes this important is that one is likely to continue to pronounce each letter as we learned to pronounce it in our mother tongue. And as a result it is very difficult to get rid of that foreign accent. [/quote]
This doesn’t invalidate your point, but I find it curious that people making this point often bring up the subtle distinctions involving voice and aspiration, in which cases I do not think that the interference is very significant. Most of the foreign accent, at least for many North Americans, is soft English vowels and incorrect vowels, e.g. saying tan (the color) instead of tahn, or woah! (stop; rhymes with owe) instead of the cleaner wo (I), and so on – plus, as Tempo Gain notes, bad tones (in which case zhuyin won’t help you). Perfection of the amount of voice in b, g or d and amount of aspiration in the t, k and p accounts for much less of the bad pronunciation of the typical foreign accent I hear (like some Americans).
Next, I disagree that zhuyin is more accurate than pinyin for this reason. That’s a common myth among local teachers, as Toasty correctly notes. Each has a one-to-one correspondence with the Mandarin sounds, and I disagree that interference is fundamental to the choice of symbols. I would argue that interference is a characteristic of the individual – that is, some people, perhaps those who are not good at acquiring foreign pronunciation, appear prone to such interference, whereas others do not. It was never a problem for me, personally. Therefore we should NEVER say that zhuyin is (fundamentally) more accurate; for me, the two systems were both perfectly accurate. We may say that for a subset of the student population, zhuyin may help avoid interference. But again, there’s no benefit in terms of tones, and that’s where the majority of the problem usually lies.
This avoidance of interference for a subset of students is not superiority of zhuyin per se, it is a benefit, one which only accrues to some students, and one comes with a very heavy price IMO – it’s much more difficult to memorize these alien symbols, they’re harder to write, and much harder to type, and it’s also far, far faster to find things in a pinyin-indexed dictionary than by any other method (I’ll race you, any day!). When I add up all the cons of zhuyin, at least for me, pinyin is greatly superior. As Tempo Gain notes, the unfamiliarity of zhuyin symbols are an unnecessary handicap.
But you have to spend extra time learning not only the symbols but also a totally new keyboard layout for them, when instead you could simply apply the skills you already have (recognition, writing and typing) with the Roman alphabet. A marginal increase in eventual typing speed, if that assertion is even true, would hardly be worth all that effort, IMHO.
Pqkdzrwt, typing speed with either Bopomofo or Pinyin very much depends on the IME. It just so happens that the best phonetic IME around is Pinyin-based: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boshiamy_method.
I spent 2 years in college back home learning Chinese from HYPY. Good, no worries, it was a decent university after all.
Here, Mandarin Training Center did not like that, and tried to put me back due to my lack of knowledge of Bopomofo. Screw them I say, what matters is actually working on your pronociation, an language lab is a great thing. I spend 1-2 hours a day practicing for the first year, and it really helped me along later. When asked why I did not use the “superior” bopomofuckmedead, I answered that I came to Taiwan in order to learn Chinese, not in order to learn some crackpot system looking like a fly walked across the page with its feet dripped in ink.
Krashen is a theorist (we do work with him, you know) but it is the people in the trenches doing TPRS and other CI methods in the classroom and doing action research as they do who are “porting” what he thinks to make it useful in the real world. He himself is quite interested in teacher training and coaching these days, which is something I am very involved with.
In a nutshell, in practical terms, if you have comprehensible input, you will get acquisition. We hasten this process by taking advantage of the stronger points of the mature brain (attention span, ability to analyze, etc.) by delivering micro-lessons on the “finer points” like the pronunciation of a particular sound, the tone, the meaning of a word, structure, etc.) But without meaning attached to the language, no acquisition can take place. Depending on the method and the audience, the meaning is dressed up as conversation, telling a story, or whatever, but it is meaningful language and 100% comprehensible to the student at all times. There is no guessing, because that slows down the process of classroom based acquisition, which is our most useful time to stuff language into the student like a goose. 
I know I’ve beaten this to death elsewhere, but yes, I teach Chinese using Pinyin. Yes, my students hear the language enough that yes, I don’t have to teach them Pinyin, and yes, they can spell with Pinyin and read it correctly. And yes, I don’t teach grammar overtly, and yes, my students can utilize all the structures in Mandarin over the course of time. And now that the HSK is being given by computer – yee-hah! No more handwriting.
As a huge fan and bit of a fascist when it comes to standards, I am all about the Hanyu Pinyin. And I see no problem with it as a method for teaching and learning Mandarin provided that some things are understood when using it. In no particular order:
It’s a phonetic replacement. The roman letters aren’t meant to convey an English (or French or Spanish) sound but to represent a Mandarin phoneme. The people who don’t get that very basic and vital point should have someone make it known to them. No that ‘C’ isn’t an English ‘C’, ‘Q’ isn’t an English ‘Q’, they’re symbols to represent a sound. Knowing that and the other rules, Pinyin becomes just as good as any other system.
I had a great teacher who was very clear in explaining Mandarin phonetics with both Pinyin and Bopomofo. There was never any problem with Pinyin because the students knew the rules.
Zhuyin Fuhao (Bopomofo) has the disadvantage to a foreign learner of requiring us to learn an entire additional alphabet. We’re already taking on a new language with a new writing system but now we have to learn an initial system before we even start? That, to my mind and my wallet, is an unnecessary extra step. And since Hanyu Pinyin is already an established system, why not just use it? (ISO standard since '82)
Taiwan doesn’t use Bopomofo on it’s signage (and they adopted Hanyu Pinyin nationwide in2009) so it seems to me to pointless to try and force it down an adult learner’s throat. Particularly when it has the distinct odour of cross-straight pissing match about it. The rest of the world is on the Hanyu Pinyin system. When businessmen and people who have studied Chinese previously come to Taiwan and they’re forced to deal with Zhuyin Fuhao it’s just going to add confusion unnecessarily.
We should all start mispronouncing it boo poo moo… Just to fuck them up like.
Ma Po DoFu (what I was calling it the first week when I was here, in jest, I promise) is actually really helpful in some cases, and in Taiwan, is handy when learning how to read, but I gotta say, I didnt take to it. My background in Japanese (there are some similar characters) was screwing me up and I was just so frusterated as I kept always trying to just figure out what the pinyin was. If youre not used to pinyin, and youre studying in Taiwan, it might be great…but if not, I dont think its detrimental.
Pinyin DOES have a little aspect that can trip you up…the letters can get you thinking in your homecountry’s language, which can be bad. Sometimes I’ll accidentally roll over something in pinyin and mispronounce it because of how its spelled…some of my latin american friends are struggling with getting past pronouncing the “j” in “jiao” and “jiu” and what have you because of their pronunciation of J.
So, theres ups and downs…but I gotta say, I like pinyin! Honestly, pinyin should only be a small part of study…you should be able to use what you want!
I’m sure my pronunciation isn’t perfect, but I don’t understand people who read pinyin like it’s English (or Spanish or any other language). I understand that other European languages pronounce letters differently. I understand that other languages such as Indonesian or Vietnamese also use a Roman alphabet and pronounce it differently. It’s like playing a different game with a chessboard. No, you can’t jump my rook and my knight and my bishop. This game has different rules. Isn’t this Piaget’s final stage? How do these people handle different currencies or different measuring systems or different time zones or that the two hemispheres are in opposite seasons? Do they think everyone in the Southern Hemisphere walks upside down? Who are these people?
Incidentally, what would be brilliant on the pinyin signage in Taiwan would be the tone marks. I learnt to read a whole bunch of characters simply from driving around Taiwan, but I have no idea about their tones.
The last time Taiwan revised its rules for romanization,I tried to get this added, at least for those street names that would otherwise be written the same. But the best I was able to manage was to get rid of the old rule forbidding the use of tone marks.
:roflmao: Come to Chiayi and show me ONE sign that uses Hanyu Pinyin…
[quote=“ell_tee”]As a huge fan and bit of a fascist when it comes to standards, I am all about the Hanyu Pinyin. And I see no problem with it as a method for teaching and learning Mandarin provided that some things are understood when using it. In no particular order:
It’s a phonetic replacement. The roman letters aren’t meant to convey an English (or French or Spanish) sound but to represent a Mandarin phoneme. The people who don’t get that very basic and vital point should have someone make it known to them. No that ‘C’ isn’t an English ‘C’, ‘Q’ isn’t an English ‘Q’, they’re symbols to represent a sound. Knowing that and the other rules, Pinyin becomes just as good as any other system.
I had a great teacher who was very clear in explaining Mandarin phonetics with both Pinyin and Bopomofo. There was never any problem with Pinyin because the students knew the rules.
Zhuyin Fuhao (Bopomofo) has the disadvantage to a foreign learner of requiring us to learn an entire additional alphabet. We’re already taking on a new language with a new writing system but now we have to learn an initial system before we even start? That, to my mind and my wallet, is an unnecessary extra step. And since Hanyu Pinyin is already an established system, why not just use it? (ISO standard since '82)
Taiwan doesn’t use Bopomofo on it’s signage (and they adopted Hanyu Pinyin nationwide in2009) so it seems to me to pointless to try and force it down an adult learner’s throat. Particularly when it has the distinct odour of cross-straight pissing match about it. The rest of the world is on the Hanyu Pinyin system. When businessmen and people who have studied Chinese previously come to Taiwan and they’re forced to deal with Zhuyin Fuhao it’s just going to add confusion unnecessarily.[/quote]
I would agree with most of what you have said, but Zhuyin is a wickedly effective aid in building advanced literacy and merging a learner’s spoken and written langauge vocabulary schemata. The mainlanders were much slower to realize the profound benefits of extensively annotated, above-elementary reading materials, and in the past 20 or so years there has been an increase in the amount of HYPY annotated readers on the mainland. However, the volume is still miniscule compared to that of Zhuyin annotated materials in Taiwan. HYPY annotation simply eats up way more space than Zhuyin annotation does. Non-native learners who happen to be in Taiwan and who are aiming for truly advanced proficiency can’t go wrong by learning Zhuyin. If the sound system is already in the head and the learner knows HYPY well, then learning Zhuyin takes no time at all.
Around 20 years ago, Zhou Youguang (the duded most responsible for adoption of HYPY on the mainland, the HYPY ISO standard and its adoption by the UN) finally acknowledged that Taiwan has done better in the way it has used Zhuyin than the mainland has done with HYPY. If Zhuyin is now good enough for the guy who killed it on the mainland, then it is good enough for me.
I do like ZYFH for reader annotation as you say, but mostly because the Western-raised eye isn’t as drawn to it as it is to Pinyin. Even after 30 years of reading Chinese every damn day, I will still read a line of Pinyin before I’ll look at the characters underneath it/around it/near it. My eye is just drawn to the English alphabet like a moth toward light.
That’s the reason why I chose to put the HYPY on the following page (overleaf) in my beginners’ readers – so the eye wouldn’t be drawn to it, but it would still be available. Maybe I’ll think about doing the traditional character versions in a ZYFH font instead. To me, I can stand looking at a paragraph of HYPY but a whole paragraph of ZYFH would just make me dizzy.
With the exception of anything by Krashen or his supporters.[/quote]
Even he wouldn’t say we are the same as babies. He still emphasizes interaction/natural communication.[/quote]
If you’d like to ask Krashen yourself, he will be speaking at 19th annual ELT symposium in Taipei on November 13th and 14. Go to www.eta.org.tw for details.
I’ve heard him speak several times there over the past few years and his current research focus is Free Reading as a source of comprehensible input.
I’m going to definitely try my best to attend that.
In TPRS (and likely most of the other CI-based methods) free reading is going to be more effective as a basis for acquisition AFTER the essentials of the structure of the language are established, OR given free reading materials that do not go beyond what the student can comprehend on his own (usually I have heard a number something like no more than 5% unknowns for independent reading, but I’m not sure what the “latest” is).
You still need something to make the input comprehensible – whether it is an explanation from somebody (for beginners) or sufficient background knowledge and language in the head already to be able to make pretty accurate guesses about the meaning of the text.
What is odd to me about the fact that ironlady has to keep speaking the basic truth is how OBVIOUS it is to anyone who is actually trying to LEARN a language. Of course you don’t want to listen to blah blah balh or read blah blah blah. If you’ve been studing for awhile you will 99% agree that blah blah blah definitely ISN’t what you want to hear. What you DO want to hear is mostly understandable stuff that you feel is related to your needs and interests. You want the person to look at you to see if you understand what he is saying, if no, you want him to slow down and likely repeat, perhaps using simplerwords and grammar. Whatever is required to let you know the meaning of the words is great, especially gestures. Gestures not only help you to guess the meaning of new words but to remember them. If you forget it the teacher can use it again to prompt you. Anything new you will likely forget so you want it recycled in a fun creative way almost immediately and again after a few minutes and again and again after that at more or less random but not to lengthy intervals after that. There should be a list of things you learned. You want to be sure that you are slowly picking up the basic grammar so the teacher should know what the basic grammar is and make sure he uses it in a situation that feels a lot like you to a conversation, except you don’t really get that much time to talk. Your mistakes should be corrected matter of factly and gently. Not so often you start losing complet confidence. The teacher can choose not to directly correct but to use the same pattern correctly in a future exchange. Explicit grammar study is probably useful to the student when he gets to the point where he starts being curious about the patterns that he sees emerging from the chaos. If the student already knows grammar you can use it more but as a pop up is probably a more useful way to spend time. If you can do it in Chinese, brilliant. It will be easier on the student sometimes. The mind is programmed to remember in stories so stories are what you should use. Ones you make up are probably better than ones you find. Stories about things that actually hapened are even better. They are more likely to contain the language you need in te future. You should learn the sound of words before the spelling. If you learn the spelling first you will likely apply an interpretation to the spelling that doesn’t correspond completely to it’s actual pronunciation thereby screwing up both you pronunciation and listening. The teacher should gradually push the student in the direction of casual, connected speech.
That is essentially it I think. To that I would add that so far I can’t see a single reason that this should not be tape recorded and made available for review, and also that language IS music and it’s musical aspects should be exagerated a bit and utilized almost constantly.
I mean all this theorizing is interesting enough but there is actuall WORK to do isn’t there… oh, sorry there isn’t any anymore is there 
In the amount of time it takes someone to read all of the posts in this thread, they could have learnt bopomofo.
Ok well perhaps not quite that quickly, but you get the idea.
Or they could have become fluent in basic Chinese, if you want to argue that way.