I know your views on this. I wholeheartedly (and respectfully) disagree.
The locals do not and will not care about which system is being used. They didn’t 10 years ago when I had these discussions with people… and they don’t now. I view this as a practical issue. You view it as a cultural/political one.
To 99.9% of the local peoples on this island, a road sign consists of Chinese characters that they read and then random English letters that they have never put a moment’s thought into.
I read Chinese. I don’t need to rely on the romanizations to navigate…but I do have MANY foreigner friends who don’t read Chinese, and it is a pain in the rear to have to figure out how to write down an address for them. At least it was… Over the past decade, almost all of the signs in Taichung have been changed to Hanyu Pinyin, and it’s wonderful. That’s why it annoys me to no end to see them going back to the times of miscellaneous romanizations on every corner.
I’ve heard several Taiwanese/Hong Kongers say this. I’m sure it has to do with what you started with. For me, it is quite difficult to read traditional characters and it can strain my eyes to see what all those extra lines are in small print. My poor kids went from Singapore to Taiwan, and now it takes them a lot longer to write their Chinese homework. Yes, some of it is because the writing is new, but there’s just so much more to write to say the same thing.
Part of it depends on what you’re used to, but there’s also cases where simplification makes similar characters harder to distinguish, and where different characters are merged into a single character.
I’ve heard this argument before, but I think it’s only really harder for the people who think the words should look less similar (people who started with traditional characters). For most everyone else, the words are different and easier to write.
Simplified is definitely easier to write. But I learned simplified before I learned complex, and I still find complex much easier to read. And aesthetically speaking, simplified characters are just plain ugly. That’s probably what hurts my eyes the most.
So I am constantly using my phone to improve my chinese reading. I can read only about 800 characters. I plan on being in Taiwan for the next 2.5 years and then moving on to Singapore or the US? I have continued to try and study simplified on my phone and bone up on traditional while helping my kids learn chinese for school.
Do you think it makes sense for me to try and study traditional, or do you think I should continue with simplified?
In that case, I would make a point of reading both. It hardly takes much extra effort, and the more you get used to how characters are simplified, the easier it gets.
Yeah, I’ve been testing myself on the simplified and noting the traditional. Unfortunately, the reading apps I use don’t show both, so I have to toggle them. Maybe I’ll try reading each article twice, one in simplified once in traditional. It’s just a little tiring knowing that in 2.5 years all that information will become useless.
That should bring you up to speed really quick. And I wouldn’t say the information will be useless. You can keep up with events in Taiwan by reading newspaper articles online.
I don’t see it as the ‘best examples’ in favour of Tongyong as so much as Tongyong is based off Hanyu Pinyin. Since 80% of Tongyong is the same as Hanyu, Those aren’t the best examples, they’re almost all of the examples. I see it as fixing some of the shortcomings on translating the names, but it doesn’t go far enough due to the Italian-sounding Cs like Cie, Ciao, Ci, Cyue. If you want my opinion. I think we could go further and create actual names for these places in English if they’re so obsessed with adding English to the official languages roster like HK does.
Why can’t Banciao be Woodbridge?
Tucheng could be Landton
Danshui could be Freshwater
There’s no such thing as a perfect system here. For some sounds, no symbol will be able to transmit accurate phonetic information to speakers of all languages. There will always be some learning curve.
That’s very charitable I’d say:
Blues: it’s what China uses
Greens: it’s what China uses
I 100% agree. That’s why I’m not too worried about nitpicking on Hanyu Pinyin’s shortfalls in natural pronunciation. It’s a romanization. In many cases, the naturally prompted pronunciation is reasonably close to true Mandarin pronunciation. In others, it falls short. But once you learn it, it works just as well as any other romanization.
I’d say:
Pro-Hanyu Pinyin: It’s what EVERYONE uses (Chinese, international Chinese, Chinese language learners, international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, etc.)
Anti-Hanyu Pinyin: It’s what China uses.
There are many problems with Tongyong. One chief problem can be described in a cartoon I once saw that went something like this:
Problem: There are 14 competing standards.
Solution: Let’s come up with a new standard to iron out the inconsistencies.
Result: There are 15 competing standards.
The other major problem is that nobody uses it. Taiwanese people don’t use it. Foreigners, when they study Chinese, learn Hanyu Pinyin (or perhaps Yale, or less commonly, Wade-Giles). As such, phrases on interpretive signs that say “Cing Dynasty” are just plain ridiculous, because in the English-speaking world, we use “Qing Dynasty” in modern texts; “Ching Dynasty” or “Ch’ing Dynasty” in older texts.
I can agree with that, however, I’ve never seen a people more obsessed with learning English than Taiwan, yet get it so wrong 90% of the time.
It’s obvious that any form of Pinyin isn’t used here by the locals and that its use is an afterthought slapped on to be more international to attract foreign tourists.
Let’s just go all the way. At the very least, most non-English western towns have either easy to pronounce names or officially translated names like Rome, Milan, Naples…
Agreed. So they should use the internationally accepted way to romanize Chinese words. That is the most convenient thing for foreign tourists. Almost any Chinese travel guidebook or pocket guide to Taiwan will make use of Hanyu Pinyin in some way…because that’s what everyone uses.
I’d say: