I’m moving this out of the other ‘practice pinyin’ thread.
Mesheel: Pinyin to Hanzi is very different than kk to English. It is not simply a tool to help you understand Chinese pronunciation.
Hanyu pinyin is a full-blown alternative orthography that can be used to represent Mandarin Chinese. KK, on the other hand, is a tool used so that learners can see how English is pronounced since its spelling system so inconsistently represents English sounds.
You have fallen victim to the myth that Chinese characters are Chinese. In fact, they are an extremely clumsy orthography that is difficult even for native speakers to write. Hanyu pinyin is simply a better tool for the job.
One of the great benefits of writing in Hanyu pinyin is that it allows us to focus our attention on grammar, accurate usage, and correct pronunciation. The over-emphasis on character learning in Chinese language teaching is putting the cart before the horse. It’s so much easier to learn characters after you know (in the sense of being able to understand and use) the words they represent. It’s also a cover for incompetent teaching (Since I have no idea how to make these foreigners speak anything but gibberish, I’ll teach them to write characters).
I can read and write Chinese fine. I prefer to use pinyin, Why? Because it’s a far better tool.
A quick caveat: Do I think the Chinese world should or will give up characters in favor of pinyin? Absolutely not. It’s an entirely different issue.
Lest anyone think I have strayed from the true path of righteousness: Long live Tongyong!!
Pinyin is the romanization of chinese characters. IMHO, I don’t think there is a need for romanization anymore as soon as one starts to study characters. Chinese is much easier to understand if one recognizes the characters. How can one every understand the different meanings of a syllable like ma, if one only reads pinyin?
Sure, pinyin is faster and more convenient to write, but practice your pinyin writing skills? Who cares if I write Taibei or TaiBei or Tai Bei? For me pinyin is a tool, that one doesn’t need anymore the more advanced ones Chinese is.
Mesheel, Pinyin actually was designed to be an alternative orthography. If I recall correctly, the original plan was to move on from Simplified Chinese to Pinyin eventually. It wasn’t designed to be a tool for teaching foreigners, it was designed to be a final goal in an orthographic reform of the Chinese language. Therein lies the difference Feiren was trying to get across between Pinyin and KK.
And your question about “understanding ma” without characters is another example of perpetuation of the myth that the written language is totally essential to Chinese. It’s not. Asking how you’d understand ‘ma’ without seeing a character is like asking how you’d understand ‘a’ in English. Context determines it. It’s not that hard to determine any given pinyin word when it is viewed as part of the language and as part of a sentence, not in a vacuum. Is ‘a’ a letter or a word in English? Is it a letter or a word in the sentence “This is a book”? Is it a letter or word in the sentence “The letter a is the first letter in the English alphabet”? What does ‘ma’ indicate in the sentence 'Ni shi yingguoren ma"? What does it indicate in the sentence “Mashang kai che”? And if characters are the supreme dictators of meaning, how does spoken Chinese even work? Unless everyone held up signs with subtitles, then it couldn’t, if your assumption that without characters one cannot determine meaning held true.
And the matter of spacing pinyin comes down to another misunderstanding, that characters, and only characters (or the syllables they represent, more correctly) are words. In pinyin, words, be they single or multiple character, are written as whole words, hence ‘diannao’ not ‘dian nao’, etc.
[quote=“mesheel”]Pinyin is the romanization of Chinese characters.
[/quote]
No. There are two major ways to represent Mandarin Chinese. Hanyu Pinyin and Chinese characters. Hanyu pinyin does not represent characters, it represents sounds and words in Mandarin. There’s a difference. Think about it.
A complete myth. Context makes it very clear. I learned this in grad school using a romanized card catalog.
[quote]
Sure, pinyin is faster and more convenient to write, but practice your pinyin writing skills? Who cares if I write Taibei or TaiBei or Tai Bei? For me pinyin is a tool, that one doesn’t need anymore the more advanced ones Chinese is.[/quote]
You need to decouple your knowledge of Chinese characters from your knowledge of Mandarin. Chinese characters are the easy part. Speaking and writing grammatical Mandarin are the hard parts.
Anyway, I once held views similar to yours, and it took a great deal of time and effort to see that I was wrong, so I’m not going to try to persuade you otherwise.
I would also add that KK is only a representation of ONE dialect of English, and arguably a dialect that nobody speaks. The same is true for IPA tables based on RP pronunciation (although I’d consider those tables to be a lot closer to the way at least a few people speak, unlike KK).
HYPY is a different thing. Rightly or wrongly, HYPY or its ROC counterpart in Zhuyinfuhao is held up as representing the ONLY standard for Putonghua. Unlike IPA or KK, HYPY is not just a tool for transcribing or sounding out phonemes. It represents THE standard that everyone in Taiwan and the mainland is taught to follow. It is used for sorting and indexing in just about every database or piece of reference on the mainland. Every mainland speaker of Putonghua learns HYPY; non-native speakers of Putonghua wouldn’t be able to learn the language without it. I dare say no native speakers of English learn IPA/KK unless they become ESL teachers or they study linguistics. Plenty or ESL students do fine without KK/IPA, too.
The only reason you and I find it troublesome to read passages in HYPY is that it is not our habit. If you did it everyday for a week, your brain would quickly get used to processing written language in that way. My guess is that we would be able to read Chinese even faster in HYPY.
sure, i know that you can understand the syllable ma from it’s context, but i find it much easier to understand and remember chinese, when i see a character in front of me and not just the pinyin syllable. Isn’t it easier to remember if you know that the hao in expressions and words like ni hao, haoxiang, bu hao yisi, hao wuliao are all the same character? It is for me at least.
I can’t read more than about twenty Chinese characters. Hao as in Ni hao
good) and hao (very) wuliao are represented by the same character? I didn’t know that and I wish you hadn’t told me. Thanks a lot. You just confused the heck out of me :taz:
I find both Zhuyin Fuhao and Hanyu Pinyin excellent tools in studying Chinese. Pinyin is fast to write and I can read it out loud at near-native speed (assuming that it’s written correctly); as well, I can use it to write down words in Chinese for the other foreign teachers at my school. Zhuyin Fuhao allows me to learn the pronunciation of characters that I don’t know simply by reading a children’s book. I can also quickly look up words in my own Pinyin dictionary this way. Taiwanese people can teach me the pronunciation of something with Zhuyin. I would strongly recommend mastering both systems.
Jive Turkey, we could make an experiment with this. Get a group of foreign students of Chinese from the same country, and teach some using Hanyu Pinyin only, and some using Zhuyin only…then check the relative rates of progress.
I haven’t seen the results myself, but a teacher here in HK told me that such studies have been done up at BLU and the results were all the same: students who learned only pinyin for their first semester blew the control group students away in every aspect of the language besides writing characters. These studies also followed the pinyin only and control group students for a couple of semesters after the pinyin only students started to learn characters and composition. The students who only learned pinyin in the first semester continued to top the control group students until the end of the study; the character drilled students never caught up during the time of the study.
This hasn’t influenced the way BLU teaches, though. As far as I know, they still do characters pretty early on in their first year classes.
As for being able to read pinyin faster than characters, I know it is possible. It’s just a matter of habit. I seriously doubt BLU or any other Chinese university will do any studies on that, though. That would be like a scholar at Notre Dame publishing an article claiming that the Pope is Satan incarnate.
That’s pretty interesting. I wonder if one’s native language influences the learning rate of pinyin vs. zhuyin as well. One of the Chinese textbooks I bought a long time ago (and I’m sure someone else has them as well) is one of the set of 6 books (Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced Chinese) circa 1971, edited by Ho Ching-hsien…they have blue covers. Anyways, the editor’s note is as follows…
“…Since World War II, the Yale Romanization system has been favorably accepted in various countries in Europe and the Americas. For students native to these areas, the Yale Romanization system proves to be of great help in the initial stages of learning Chinese. For Oriental [sic] students, especially those from Korea and Japan, it is advisable to use the Mandarin phonetic alphabet [meaning, Zhuyin Fuhao]. The intermediate and advanced instructional volumes use no romanization except in the vocabulary columns. This method not only increases the students’ interest in learning but also brings satisfactory results.” – Ho Ching-hsien, January 1, 1971, Taipei, R.O.C.
Why would it be advisable for Asians to learn the Zhuyin instead? :s
It’s from a different age, really, isn’t it? It sounds as if he’s hinting that whiteys are just going to have that much more difficulty getting their heads round those squiggles… but they have have to learn Hanzi eventually anyway don’t they. :s
The point probably is that (a) the Yale system is quite close to American English orthography in terms of the way it represents sounds in standard Mandarin (so 是 is written ‘shr’ for example). And (b) the Japanese and Koreans already have squiggly syllabaries (is Hangul a syllabary? who knows? let’s start a thread!) as part of their own writing systems, so are assumed to be able to get to grips with bopomofo more easily.
But since bopomofo only takes about three hours to learn and students from [quote=“Ho Ching-Hsien”] various countries in Europe [/quote]don’t speak American English, I have my doubts.
I think pinyin is very close to German, at least it was always very easy for me to read. I think there are only a view letters, that are not pronounced as in German, like x,z,ch,q etc.
