I’m currently thinking about doing a one year program at a university in Taiwan for Mandarin. While I know the zhuyin symbols from childhood, my knowledge is rusty and my recent study has been in pinyin.
My question is do the Taiwan university programs allow use of pinyin while you are learning the characters or would I be expected to learn pronounciations from zhuyin only? I have the equivalent of one year of undergraduate Mandarin.
It might depend somewhat on the school, but TW does not use Hanyu Pinyin as a standard. You might see some of Taiwan’s own version of pinyin. However, while most teachers will have some pinyin awareness, you’re likely to be expected to produce zhuyin fuhao for tests or when writing the pronunciation of characters (my teachers at Shida always did).
See the thread entitled “Studying Zhuyin” for more discussion.
i know what u mean about zhuyin being rusty - but to be honest - u don’t need to let that bother u. zhuyin has like what, 24 characters? u’ll be able to pick them up really fast once u find urself back into it. even a single evening 3-hour study session in chinese, not specifically trying to study zhuyin, and u’ll have it.
[quote=“MaGwaiFan”]I’m currently thinking about doing a one year program at a university in Taiwan for Mandarin. While I know the zhuyin symbols from childhood, my knowledge is rusty and my recent study has been in pinyin.
My question is do the Taiwan university programs allow use of pinyin while you are learning the characters or would I be expected to learn pronounciations from zhuyin only? I have the equivalent of one year of undergraduate Mandarin.[/quote]
if u are here for Mandarin learning, Most of university teach both Pinyin and zhuyin. For a Foreigners’ Mandarin Teaching teacher, Pinyi makes Foreigner students easy to learn and pronounce well; and the zhuyin system is actually for your hand writing, it’s the introductory study for u to practice how the chinese character be composed. But few of us teach simplified here.
Thanks to all for the help.
yisha’ou- Taiwan’s various homebrew pinyins are gruesome, if I face the situation I’ll just work harder to relearn zhuyin.
14- I hope I can get it back that quick.
Victoria- I’ve actually observed that the I pronounce words I learned in zhuyin better than the ones I learned in pinyin. Currently my character knowledge is an ugly mix of traditional and simplified characters but I guess I will just adjust.
Learning the pronunciation in Zhuyin is the only way to go. I didn’t learn Zhuyin until after eight months of living in Taiwan - and that was a big mistake. I only studied Hanyu Pinyin, and since I obviously associate Latin letters with English… it messed up my pronunciation for so long. My pronunciation only started to improve once I heard people speaking. With Zhuyin on the other hand, if you can say the Zhuyin correctly, then your pronunciation (aside from tones) will be pretty darn good.
The only point in learning Hanyu Pinyin is because so many people use it because of the PRC. And also, it’s easier to type on a keyboard for two reasons: you don’t need to learn new placement of characters, and you don’t need to input tones.
By far the best way to practice your Zhuyin is to send text messages! Why type in “tomorrow”, which takes up 8 spaces, when you can use 1 character?!
Once you recognize the real characters, however… all those phonetic systems in Taiwan won’t even matter to you. They mostly use Wade-Giles, and are changing to Hanyu Pinyin, and Tongyong Pinyin in some places.
Tongyong Pinyin is actually more tailored to the English language, for example, “wind” is “fong” - exactly as you’d say it in English. But in Hanyu Pinyin, it’s weird… “feng”.
Oh, for heaven’t sake. I’m not even going to bother to re-list all the arguments for Hanyu Pinyin’s equivalency on a functional basis with Zhuyin. It’s been rehashed here time and time again.
There is no linguistic advantage to either system. Pinyin is a bit easier to type for most Westerners (and easier to text message on cell phones if you don’t use characters. 
)
Actually, I can think of one advantage of hanyu pinyin: it has the capacity to reflect some dialectal differences-- such as the “r” sound in Beijing Mandarin.
But other than that, they are completely equivalent. Pronunciation errors originate from people making the mistake of pronouncing the words like English spelling and not realizing it’s a foreign language. You’d have the same pronunciation errors in French, Italian, or Spanish if you tried to pronounce their alphabet according to English rules as well.
Still, if you’re going to be in Taiwan and attending school here you would be best served to use bpmf.
Do the country a favor and delicately insist on pinyin. Maybe they’ll join the rest of the civilized world and start using it.
I agree. Having learned Hanyu Pinyin throughout my years of studying Mandarin in Australia, for me bopomofo just means a few extra symbols to learn…nothing else! Though my teacher here was quite happy to use Pinyin in class when I said I hadn’t learned bopomofo before.
Warning…linguistics nerd alert:
When I first arrived in Taiwan we had an introductory class in Zhuyin - I appreciated the way the teacher grouped them according to what type of sound they were. (bilabials, dentals, dipthongs, etc) I still like to practice my aspirated and unaspirated sounds… 