Me knew a fellow in korea who spoke in the language reserveth for royalty (the way thee would’st speak to royalty as a normal person). He wore purple. Lots of purple. He wasn’t attracteth to the same sex (not maketh any statement on that). He was in the special forces when he had to serve and was very good at taekwondo. He also went to seoul national university (the taida of korea). Smart fellow but of course most eccentric.
Hark! Thine exposition doth stir a faint remembrance, whereby one Forumosan was beseeched by his pupil to verily enlighten upon the usage of “lest” and “shall”. "Gonna" and "wanna" rant - #36 by tigerninjaman
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The main difference between zhuyin and say the english alphabet is enlosh only has 26. You are including combinationa of letters. Which isnt really any different in reality. But i prefer a laid out alphabet over one like english.
My issue with characters is there is no way of reading or writing them without plain ol memoization. A word written with its phonetic symbols seems far more logical no? Instead of memorizing thousands of characters.
#3 agreed. Its just annoying as a big nose 
Would this be similar to the Japanese language.
Zhuyin is ONLY for pronunciation, it is not used in written Chinese at all, it is likely a recent invention (relative to written Chinese).
Written Chinese has “bases” but you really have to learn those bases before you can even begin to understand the more complex ones made up of 2 or more bases. That unfortunately requires memorization. Furthermore, there are a lot more than 26 bases.
As an interesting observation, Google Translate seems to work fine with toneless pinyin input.
Does anyone want to try it with some more complex Chinese sentences in pinyin?
Not bragging, but I learned 注音符號 in less than a day. A very direct symbol-sound correspondence. I still use it for learning characters from children’s books. Never caught on to 拼音 (L1 interference being raised on phonics + divergences in Romanization systems).
The facility of using the ㄅㄆㄇㄈ symbols is assisted greatly by predictive text input technology. In fact, I only type using the 注音符號 system because, as mentioned, I can’t remember which way to spell a simple word like 西 (xi, shi, hsi, see … Well all these examples come from signs on 西門路 in 臺南). On my phone, I might respond to a message in Chinese if the input language happens to be set as Chinese at the time. For example, typing 哈哈 requires the use of only two symbols (ㄏ ㄏ）， while the predictive texting of haha requires at least three, at least in this case (hah).
On a regular PC keyboard, I can still manage with 注意, but have to be clear on the time and include the full set of synonym symbols (eg., ㄏㄚ- ㄏㄚ-). Maybe there’s a predictive input system for keyboards, but I’ve yet to find one.
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I can type in Chinese faster with Pinyin than native speaker with zhuyin
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My good friend, who is a Taiwanese professor, similarly uses Pinyin to compose messages – and very quickly. I ask glad to agree that it depends on the individual.
Yeah I never bothered with written Chinese
I could see how that would work. However finding the zhuyin symbols on the key pad is the block that I’d stumble at.
On the rareish occasions I have to type Chinese I have to try several different pinyins to get what turns out to be the incorrect character, lol
Don’t know, the correct pronunciation + don’t know the correct pinyin + don’t know the correct character.
Having that said the miscommunication in writing is actually a scale level below the spoken miscommunication.
Sometimes people are just on a different wavelength
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That’s why every Chinese schoolchild has already learned it.
They’re / there / their
Didn’t even have to try to come up with that. I bet there’s more .
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a quick google search confirms (full disclosure, i only skimmed)
https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/fun/wordplay/multinyms.html
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Off the top of my head: pair / pear / pare. (whoops… just realized that the highly extensive list of multinyms already includes this and many more.)
There was a thread a while back about measuring creativity by the ability to come up with words that are semantically unrelated to each other. Maybe the task of coming up with multinyms might also be some measure of creativity…?
why stop at three?
hoard, horde, hoared, whored
We can add “hold” to that list… if we allow Japanese (mis)pronunciation of foreign loan words. 
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They’re and there/their have different pronunciations…
Maybe in some regions / dialects / bastardizations, but mw is happy with ˈt͟her as a pronunciation for all 3. How do you pronounce them differently?