[quote=“sofun”]
Misconception No.1. - You have to obey 台日大辭典.
WRONG. The truth is, you don’t. 台日大辭典 gave you a glimpse of the power of Kana, like a fancy demo to peak into the lab of a scientist. But it is NOT recommend that you use the intermediary product in real life.
In 10 minutes, I’m going to show you why.
…
Misconception No.3. There is only one way to do Kana and therefore is hard.
NOT TRUE. Kana is so flexible that you can do it at home, in the office, and in the gym. This is because kana is built on some VERY BASIC PRINCIPLES and is customizable. As long as you understand the principles and do it consistently, you can make Kana fit your schedule. You don’t even have to sacrifice your social life for Kana.
In 10 minutes, I’m going to show you how to customize Kana to fit your unique lifestyle.[/quote]
In other words, you are going to throw away 50 years worth of Kana-based Holo annotation and come up with something as random as your romanization system, which would require a lot of modifications to Kana itself, making it impossible to do on computers because the Japanese government would never push your system to the UNICODE consortium for you.
In that case why even go with Kana in the first place, why not just invent a new Taiwanese script all together. There are people already doing that.
There are a lot of products, and you’ve tried them all. But they don’t give you result. Why? they are products with handicapped features, knock-offs and all they want is to keep you wasting time on buying their products that do not deliver the result you want.
The fact is, there is nothing wrong with your genetics. You just haven’t been shown the right way to activate its’ built-in automatic superdrive.
[quote=“sofun”]Okay guys, before I show you the power of Kana, you must have a lot of doubt.
This is perfectly normal. I’ve been there and I understand.
But let’s question ourselves.What’s the most important thing that we want?[/quote]
Yes that’s right. We want result.
It is the result that matters.[/quote]
you do know the difference between a forum and a chat room right? or an infomercial for that matter…
Ok guys, I’m going to show you the secret power of Kana now, and why it simply works.
Secret 1. Kana works with Hanzi. The entire Kana system is built on the DNA of Hanzi. Not only is it designed to work with Hanzi, it is also designed to work independently, just like Hanzi itself. What’s more crazy is that it works with Hanzi in so many different ways. It is Hanzi on steroid.
[quote=“hansioux”]
In other words, you are going to throw away 50 years worth of Kana-based Holo annotation…[/quote]
This is a common misconception. Kana is designed to work seamlessly with Hanzi.
You can have one phrase, one sentence almost entirely in Hanzi. But wherever you need a Kana, it kicks in automatically. Let me show you how.
「台灣え主張」
「島國え前進」
Wow! This is powerful, right? It’s so simple, yet so powerful. This is something that 台日大辭典 does not tell you specifically to do, but it’s given you enough hint, enough confidence that you can take it to the next level!
Kana is an optimized, super efficient system that works and delivers result. It is so robust that you can customize it to your particular lifestyle. It makes your life easy. Why? It is Hanzi on steroid. Let me show you another example, and you’ll be even more convinced.
「我欲去カナダ。」
Pretty impressive huh? It turns a full sentence automatically into Taigi. Not only that, it gives you the option of choosing the proper Hanzi to fit your preferences. There is no doubt that this sentence bursts into Taigi mode instantly.
Let’s see why the all-Han falls short:
「我欲去加拿大。」
Mmm. nah. It just doesn’t do it, right? Let’s try Hok’s suggestion, the Bopomo:
「我欲去ㄎㄚㄋㄚㄉㄚ。」
You see, Bopomo is trying to do the job that Kana does perfectly already. But because Bopomo is just a plug-in, we don’t want to use it directly and blindly. We’ll use Bopomo when we have to. And in the future when we phase out Bopomo, Kana will still work.
yup. That’s why it is just a derivative of the regular a.
Prolong the vowel may result in nasalizing it. (may or may not, but it tends to.)
Shorten it definitely results in no nasalization.
It’s natural.[/quote]
The Germans have many “prolonged vowels” such as uhr, fahren, stuhl, höher, never have I once heard them pronounced with nasalization. The German language would be an anomaly if such phenomenon is indeed so common and natural. I think using prolonged vowels to approximate nasalization is a Japanese characteristics and has little to do with Holo phonology except to reflect how some characters might had been read in Old Chinese.[/quote]
Notice we are only using the appearance of a prolonged sound to hint. For example, 英 annotated as いーん. We want to trigger the natural reaction of the reader. This is the power of Kana working in the background. Similar to ~ hinting at a nasal vowel ã.
It is very visual and it gives us what we we want: the result that works.
You happen to have chosen a convenient example with Canada. Show me something with a glottal or nasal or velar final. Kana doesn’t even have the inherent facility to represent “ng.”
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]Bopomofo was invented by Zhang Taiyan, a native of Jiangsu, China. It definitely resembles Japanese kana in both form and function, but it is neither based on nor complementary to Kana. There is in fact nothing to indicate it was not invented by Chinese scholars for the Chinese language.
If you are claiming that they are in fact connected, please provide a source; otherwise I have no reason to believe you.[/quote]
We can gain a deeper understanding of the power of Kana by studying how the derivative Bopomo works. The Bopomo not only resembles Katakana カタカナ in shape, it also complements Kana. See below the Kana matrix and the conjugate Bopomo matrix.
We can see for the most part, the vowel that is present in the KEY of the Bopomo plug-in was designed to be one that complements the original gold-standard Kana. Both the wisdom and the design intent of Bopomo need not be concealed!
Hok, very good question and I said I’d show you the misconception.
A common misconception is that each Kana has to occupy one vowel, and it is fixed. This is totally WRONG.
A very simple example is the Japanese word 学生, which can be written as がくせい. Now watch this. The pronunciation that かくせい represents is “Gakse,” despite the fact that unskilled Japanese learners like myself thought it was a 4-syllable ga-ku-se-i. This is a common mistake.
がく CAN represent only one syllable, just like the “k” in “Gak” does not necessarily add an additional syllable.
Skipping gakusei for the time being, what about words like 鄉? The closest you could get is ひよんぐ plus a tone mark, turning one syllable into four (you might argue three) and making a very long string of ruby characters. In Hangul, for comparison, we could make this very concise: 형 with tone mark.
Let us try another common word to debunk the common misconception. 国際. This word, if written in kana-only, is こくさい.
Are there 4 syllables?
Again the answer is NO. Here we have a Gok and a Sai diphthong. It is not tricky. It is as natural as the roman alphabet.
What did I say about Kana? It is Hanzi supercharged!
Hok. Crazy eh? But it’s true. The kata-style Bopomo even came with a set of cursive, hira-style Bopomo! (Although it looked actually more like the italics of the roman alphabet). See the picture in the broken link.
This was in the beginning years of the 20th century, where China learned, copied, and studied deligently from Japan. This is kinda taboo and a tiny bit political, I know. But let’s not get sidetracked.
If you’re not convinced, let me show you the all-important vowel array.
ㄚㄧㄨㄝㄛㄜ
[color=#666666]アイウエオ
ヲ [/color]
Here the design intent was obvious, that is: duplicate the set of the kana vowel by hacking it (as in a creative sense). Vowels are crucial in application, so the Bopomo designer must have its own set.
Once we have established that in Japanese 学 is がく, we can of course naturally understand that 學 is はくin Tagi. It is so simple that it just works.
Hok, let’s take a preview at the ひ Column that I have yet to shown you. There will be an entry where ひょん represents the Taigi pronunciation of 鄉.
Why? Review the first tables gave you in Lesson 1, and you see ん as in 黃 in Taigi. which is the ng that you’re looking for. Badda Bing, Badda Boom!
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]
Also, why have you chosen hiragana over katakana?[/quote]
Another good question. We choose Hiraganaひらがな in modern Taigi writing just as Japan chooses Hiragana for modern Japanese writing. We reserve the Katakanaカタカナ for new, imported words, which are commonly known as 外來語 in both countries. Hence
「我欲去カナダ。」
Bang! Right on target.
What did I say about forward looking capability and interoperability of Kana? Unmatched by any other knock-offs!
When I was little, we were immersed in the world of the ㄅㄆㄇ, reciting it as fast as we could, forward and backward, to one another as a learning game. Ah~those innocent years.
The signature of a scrambled code shown below:
メㄨ
せㄝ
コㄩㄇㄈ
ヌㄆ
ムㄙㄊ
テㄘ
and many more telltale signs of where an artist gets his inspiration from. And of course the first one who comes up with the idea is always brilliant! Condensing Hanzi to create a set of supercharged phonetic symbols — this is the brilliance of Kana.
