Pet Peeve with KK/phonics in Taiwan

I posted this on Dave’s but that place is dead as a doornail. Maybe I can get a better response here.

Okay so in KK, the short “i” sound is written with a smaller version of the capital “I”, right? And the long “e” sound is written with a lower case “i”.
So why in the world, in words like candy, baby, and trophy, where the “y” carries the long “e” sound is it transcribed with the smaller “I”, when it sould be “i”?
Also, in almost every class I come across, the kids pronounce the short “i” exactly the same as the long “e” and some teachers even teach this way. So instead of did it’s deed instead of sister, it’s seester. When I had my initial training, the head guy in the chain school heirarchy observed us, and he actually corrected me and told me to teach the sounds this way.
Maybe my point isn’t coming across so well on this forum, too bad I don’t have a phonetic transcription program on my computer

I’m so happI you mentioned this! This is one of my peeves as well. I did a lot of asking on this one and found out that this is a “rule” everyone here gets taught in school. I think the rule traces back to a single dictionary that is or was commonly used here in the school system. This dictionary was clearly written by someone who wasn’t a native speaker, because the “rule” is dead wrong. But such is the power of rules here, that I could never ever persuade my editors to write the pronunciation correctly in the learning materials we created. They agreed that I was right, but didn’t want to challenge a “rule” that all Taiwanese believe in.

I think this original faulty dictionary was used as a template for all other locally-produced English dictionaries, because the mistake exists in all of the dictionaries you can find in Taiwan that use KK.

Furthermore, since few dictionaries outside Taiwan use KK at all, preferring more sensible pronunciation systems, it is hard to find a correctly written KK pronunciation for ‘happy.’ In the absence of such “evidence,” few locals will admit you are right when you tell them it should be /hapi/ not /hapI/. They will not allow your non-KK evidence (or common sense) to defeat their belief.

I suspect Taiwan chose to worship KK because it is the most-powerful phonetic transcription scheme in the world and can be used on any language. Of course, using it for English alone is like using a chainsaw to cut down a sapling. The student is confused its unnecessary precision. Precision must be good right? Not when you’re trying to speak in an unfamiliar language!

I hate KK.

So you know, KK is not capable of describing every language. That would be IPA, from which KK is derived. KK doesn’t deserve that kind of respect.

That will be all.

Thanks so much. The kids have a hard enough time confusing the short i and long e and then KK goes and makes it even harder. I guess it doesn’t help that other teachers teach the short i sound as long e either.

So glad my school teaches with a real phonics system rather than some contrived system like KK.

Same here. I’ve been using the Hooked on Phonics and other teaching gear for phonics.

Anyboby wants to mention KK they get tossed out the door along with the rest of the trash. :smiley: :smiley:

KK just adds another step that the kids don’t need and which makes language acquisition more mecanical and less natural - and therefore less effective.

Anyone tried ‘How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons’? Miracles happen when I use that book, and not a KK symbol in sight.

[quote=“John Wells”]Another recent trend is that of pronouncing the vowel at the end of happy, coffee, valley tense, like beat, rather than lax like bit. This is actually another weak vowel, restricted like schwa to unstressed syllables. Traditionally it was identified with the vowel of bit, and transcribed identically, /I/. However LDOCE decided instead to use the symbol /i/ (without length marks) for this vowel. This was intended as a kind of cover symbol, which everyone could interpret in their own way: traditionalists could think of it as identical with /I/, whereas users of the tenser vowel might want to identify it with /i:/. I followed this lead in my LPD and so subsequently did Roach in EPD-15 and Ashby in the Oxford ALD. (In fact we need two extra weak vowels: /i/ in happy and /u/ in situation.)
.[/quote]

phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-english.htm

While KK is certainly not perfect, it is suffcient for the needs of students. They are not linguists and don’t need the precision of IPA. What they need is a minimal set of symbols that can approximate English sounds. Forget the subtleties.

Students need to know KK, like it or not. Every English-Chinese dictionary I’ve seen here uses KK. Also, why does teaching KK (or another apprpriate phonetic system) make language acquisition less effective? I see it as helping make the students more independent. Now they can consult a dictionary to find out how to correctly pronounce a word.

As for the ‘y’ in happy, that is one of the shortcomings of KK. The ‘y’ is not as long as long e. Also, in KK long vowel symbols aren’t used in unstressed syllables. But then again I could be wrong on both points.

For those who dislike KK, what would you suggest as a replacement?

[quote=“NeonNoodle”]While KK is certainly not perfect, it is suffcient for the needs of students. They are not linguists and don’t need the precision of IPA. What they need is a minimal set of symbols that can approximate English sounds. Forget the subtleties…

For those who dislike KK, what would you suggest as a replacement?[/quote]What may be useful to (adult) students is a phonemic representation system. K.K. is an attempt at that. It nearly makes the grade but falls down on a couple of points such as the one noted above. Nevertheless, as you said, it’s in wide use here so if students feel the need to learn a English phonemic system for use here perhaps that would be the most useful.

What people often refer to as IPA is actually one of several English phonemic subsets of IPA. They usually mean the chart of 44 phonemes devised by Adrian Underhill. developingteachers.com/phonology/sounds.htm

A little more on K.K. and IPA here:
ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/intro%20page8.htm

Students need to know KK, like it or not. Every English-Chinese dictionary I’ve seen here uses KK. Also, why does teaching KK (or another apprpriate phonetic system) make language acquisition less effective? I see it as helping make the students more independent. Now they can consult a dictionary to find out how to correctly pronounce a word.[/quote]

It’s less effective simply because they will always have to look it up instead of sounding out the word itself.

You really can’t see that adding another step takes away the art of reading and makes it mechanical? How did you learn to read? I learned by remembering sight words and sounding out the others.

The biggest problem here is that they insist on teaching kids English by doing it the Taiwanese/Chinese way (bo po mo fo). That is why the island has such poor English skills compared to other Asian countries that learn English the English way (Singapore, Philippines, etc.) Japan has a similar problem.

[quote=“smithsgj”][quote=“John Wells”]Another recent trend is that of pronouncing the vowel at the end of happy, coffee, valley tense, like beat, rather than lax like bit. This is actually another weak vowel, restricted like schwa to unstressed syllables. Traditionally it was identified with the vowel of bit, and transcribed identically, /I/. However LDOCE decided instead to use the symbol /i/ (without length marks) for this vowel. This was intended as a kind of cover symbol, which everyone could interpret in their own way: traditionalists could think of it as identical with /I/, whereas users of the tenser vowel might want to identify it with /i:/. I followed this lead in my LPD and so subsequently did Roach in EPD-15 and Ashby in the Oxford ALD. (In fact we need two extra weak vowels: /i/ in happy and /u/ in situation.)
.[/quote]

phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-English.htm[/quote]

I shouldn’t have posted that without an explanation. The point is that the last vowel in “happy” is not necessarily the vowel in “beat” (NeonNoodle mentioned this in passing). According to Wells (who knows about these things!) it used to be the same as the vowel in “bit”. Now, it seems to be moving towards the “beat” vowel.

The “happy” vowel isn’t a phoneme in its own right, because there are no minimal pairs eg /hApi:/ vs /hApI/. (the reason we know /i:/ and /I/ are different phonemes is because of the existence of minimal pairs like “beat” and “bit”, two different words with different meanings)

Traditionally though phoneticians have transcribed “happy” with the “bit” vowel – whether they are using KK, or any other variant of the IPA.

[quote=“smithsgj”][quote=“smithsgj”][quote=“John Wells”]Another recent trend is that of pronouncing the vowel at the end of happy, coffee, valley tense, like beat, rather than lax like bit. This is actually another weak vowel, restricted like schwa to unstressed syllables. Traditionally it was identified with the vowel of bit, and transcribed identically, /I/. However LDOCE decided instead to use the symbol /i/ (without length marks) for this vowel. This was intended as a kind of cover symbol, which everyone could interpret in their own way: traditionalists could think of it as identical with /I/, whereas users of the tenser vowel might want to identify it with /i:/. I followed this lead in my LPD and so subsequently did Roach in EPD-15 and Ashby in the Oxford ALD. (In fact we need two extra weak vowels: /i/ in happy and /u/ in situation.)
.[/quote]

phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-English.htm[/quote]

I shouldn’t have posted that without an explanation. The point is that the last vowel in “happy” is not necessarily the vowel in “beat” (NeonNoodle mentioned this in passing). According to Wells (who knows about these things!) it used to be the same as the vowel in “bit”. Now, it seems to be moving towards the “beat” vowel.

The “happy” vowel isn’t a phoneme in its own right, because there are no minimal pairs eg /hApi:/ vs /hApI/. (the reason we know /i:/ and /I/ are different phonemes is because of the existence of minimal pairs like “beat” and “bit”, two different words with different meanings)

Traditionally though phoneticians have transcribed “happy” with the “bit” vowel – whether they are using KK, or any other variant of the IPA.[/quote]

Give me a friggin’ break! Do you guys actually teach ENGLISH in Taiwan, or anywhere else in the world?

Oh yes, of course! How could I forget! It as in bit is now pronounced as eat as in heat. That is where it is moving you know. Excuse me, I haven’t seen it moving anywhere. Well, along the Arizona border it is eat and hit is heat and those folks do move pretty queekly when the Border Patrol is after them.

Si no te parece mi alusi

I teach here, yeah, but Wells pretty much confines himself to writing books about phonetics and phonology I think.

It’s got nothing to do with the pronunciation of “it” or “eat”. Those two form a minimal pair, one contains the phoneme /i:/ and the other /I/ and no-one is contesting that.

OP was talking about the pronunciation of the second vowel in “candy” or “happy”. He was saying it was incorrectly represented in KK as /I/. My point is that this is indeed how the sound was once spoken. These days the sound (the second vowel of “happy”) is moving towards /i:/, but I don’t think it has yet reached /i:/ and there’s no particular reason to choose /i/ over /I/ in KK, or any other system derived from IPA.

[quote=“Ramblin Rube”] Si no te parece mi alusi

I must say, this is a very stimulating conversation considering the subject matter. :slight_smile:

I think perhaps Mr. Rude raised an interesting point even if he didn’t mean to. Regional accents make a mess out of such a precise system as KK, don’t they?

And another thing I was thinking, this one on the issue of “actually teaching,” is that I feel it to be far better for a student to learn a word using their auditory memory rather than their visual memory. This is also certainly they way native speakers learn 99% of their common vocabulary. When learning a second language, I feel it is misguided to learn new words based on textual input, although I do this all the time for learning Chinese. I suspect that is why my Chinese is so weak despite a lot of effort.

I reason things this way: If you first remember a word auditorily, when later trying to use that word in conversation, it is a simple and quick matter of hearing it in your memory and then putting it on your tongue. But if you, instead, first “see” the word (either written, or transcribed phonetically), your brain will need to do an extra decoding step, thus slowing down the speed at which you can place the word on your tongue, thus making conversation more difficult.

Some of the best second-language English speakers I know learn all their English through their ears. In the long run, I think this limits them their vocabulary development. Studying words is also a good habit, but I think the ears may be far more efficient than the eyes.

Well some of us spend our research days worrying about this stuff! :s

He was on about foreign accents but yeah you’re right. Like this /hapI/ thing, well that’s exactly how it’s pronounced in say N England. And yeah phonemic inventories do vary from one dialect of English to another – in most American accents “hawk” and “hock” sound exactly the same… try telling that to an Englishman. In N English accents, the vowel in “but” and “put” is the same (like standard “put”) and “look” and “Luke” sound teh same. John Wells did a lot of work on establishing systematic phonemic inventories for different accent groups.

[quote=“dearpeter”] And another thing I was thinking, this one on the issue of “actually teaching,” is that I feel it to be far better for a student to learn a word using their auditory memory rather than their visual memory. This is also certainly they way native speakers learn 99% of their common vocabulary. When learning a second language, I feel it is misguided to learn new words based on textual input, although I do this all the time for learning Chinese. I suspect that is why my Chinese is so weak despite a lot of effort.

I reason things this way: If you first remember a word auditorily, when later trying to use that word in conversation, it is a simple and quick matter of hearing it in your memory and then putting it on your tongue. But if you, instead, first “see” the word (either written, or transcribed phonetically), your brain will need to do an extra decoding step, thus slowing down the speed at which you can place the word on your tongue, thus making conversation more difficult.

Some of the best second-language English speakers I know learn all their English through their ears. In the long run, I think this limits them their vocabulary development. Studying words is also a good habit, but I think the ears may be far more efficient than the eyes. [/quote]

I agree with the principle. But what does it mean to remember a word, or some other unit, auditorily? What do you hook on to if there is no visual clue? Sure, that’s what native speakers do (and I guess tw kindy kids could do it too) but once you’re a bit older adn learning language, not acquiring it, you have to keep records in order to learn. I suppose you could take a tape recorder to class, or self-learn from websites that have audio. You need to be exposed to patterns repeatedly to get them down.

It wouldn’t be necessary to replace KK. You just have to change the attitude about KK that is in the public schools and that many of the local teachers have.

For most of the kids KK is just another spelling they have to memorize. What is the point of a phonetic spelling when you have “pity” spelled ['pItI] and the two sounds are different. And what about the word Monday being ['mvndI] (v in place of the “uh” sound)? Sure, some people in some places say “Mundee”, but the kids have to learn what is in their dictionary. It totally defeats the purpose of having a phonetic respelling.

I agree, you don’t have to use the full set of IPA symbols. A broad transcription (and KK is just broad transcription IPA with a few changes) is fine. But it needs to be used to describe pronunciation, not as a second spelling.

KK is more than symbols for phonetic writing. It is a system with some minor inhernet flaws and some major implementation errors. If those were fixed I’d have no problem with KK, but sicne they are a deep-roote part of KK, I REALLY dislike it.

It’s moving towards /i:/ but it is at /i/, no where near /I/ in standard speech. As you said earlier, these kids are not linguists. They don’t need the sound to reflect how it used to sound. They need it written in a way that when they try to pronounce it they’ll approximate a native speaker. Which symbol does that?

KK was intended to serve the needs of 2nd language learners in Taiwan. It fails to do that. Not because it is not suited to the task (despite a few deficiencies), but because of how it is being used and the attitudes people have towards it.

We need to keep in mind that we are trying to teach a standard North American standard. There is a degree of variability in what is standard, but we do have a good idea of what should be correct.

pwh the two vowels in “pity” are not the same (what sounds are, in different contexts, after all?) but they are (a) probably the same phoneme and (b) close enough for me, and probably close enough for the learners you describe. Certainly the “-y” is more like the second vowel in “pitiful” than the one in “please”.

That was what the OP asked, and that is the answer.

“Monday” is a case of vowel reduction. There’s a trend here too: nobody reduces the vowel any more!

Of course it doesn’t actually matter a hoot because the Taiwanese, like the “illegals” in Arizona, don’t distinguish between /i/ and /I/ in their accent of English. That’s nothing to do with KK, it’s just that there’s only the one vowel in Chinese (and Spanish).

The deficiencies of KK are to do with internal consistency, and the fact that it presents a phonemic inventory that is not representative of the English that any native speaker on the planet actually speaks :astonished:

I’d like to know more about the “implementation errors” you speak of. In what sense is KK being used as a second spelling, if that is the main or sole implementation error? (I’ve never taught kids, as you’ve probably gathered) Do you mean that the kids can use it as an alternative script when writing, as they seem to be allowed to do with zhuyin fuhao if they don’t know a character?

And Phonics? Isn’t that a form of weird spelling too? (Like you write “kar” for “car” or something, right?) But that is never actually used as a alternative spelling?

I’m trying to think how I learnt French as a kid: I started learning at school when I was eleven, kept it up, lived in France for a bit, and at that point I could sometimes pass for a native speaker. But I never learnt any phonetic symbols for French, or any pronunciation rules at all as far as I can recall, and it was only when I came to study linguistics, years and years later, that I found out that the vowels in “peur” and “soeur” are different, as are those in “son” and “sans”. And to this day I don’t really know how to pronounce what is normally a nasalized vowel before another vowel (“un agent”).

I suppose I just worked out the rules for myself, relying largely on English spelling/pronunciation as a hook. But Chinese kids who only know zhuyin fuhao and a few characters can’t use that approach. So what else can they use, apart from KK?

Key difference between me learning French and these kids learning English is that I don’t think I was ever expected to memorize or internalize anything. We just kind of talked and read stuff, wrote little essays… damn, I wish I could remember what we did. Certainly no lists of vocab to learn for a test.

It’s not KK. It’s not the attitude towards KK or the implementation of it, really. It’s the way they do education here; instead of learners learning and teachers teaching, we have learners memorizing and parroting, and teachers giving tests.

[quote=“Stray Dog”]

The biggest problem here is that they insist on teaching kids English by doing it the Taiwanese/Chinese way (bo po mo fo). That is why the island has such poor English skills compared to other Asian countries that learn English the English way (Singapore, Philippines, etc.) Japan has a similar problem. [/quote]

Missed this before. SD, English plays an entirely different role in Singaporean and Philippine society. It’s used as a medium of instruction, people speak it to each other day to day, it’s used as the national language for certain purposes. I think the reason that all educated people in these two countries speak English fluently has a lot to do with history, and nothing at all to do with the absence of KK.

Can you cite any other countries to make your point?