as demonstrated in a video in Resources for learning/using Taiwanese/Holo/Hoklo
in Holo where there are 7 tones, given a context of the conversation, it is possible to convey a message just in tones (playing corresponding notes on a guitar).
I suppose it’s like answering someone with your mouth full, Non-tonal languages do it with stresses, tonal languages does it with humming tones…
That’s a commonly repeated fallacy. BPMF does not bring any closer to the “correct” pronunciation than pinyin does. It depends on how you learn it and what your native language is more than anything else, especially since all transcription methods, from BPMF to Wade-Giles to Hanyu Pinyin, are all nominally based on a Northeast China pronunciation which is just not spoken in Taiwan. That’s why 言, for example, is yán or ㄧㄢˊ, even though this not reflect at all how Taiwanese people pronounce it, which in IPA would be more like ɪɛn (my IPA is a little rusty, so that may be slightly wrong.)
It’s pretty ridiculous for an entire country of people to be holding themselves to the standard of another country. Americans don’t say you’re wrong if you don’t use “Queen’s English,” so why should Taiwan do it? When nobody is doing things in the “standard” way, it’s time to redefine “standard.”
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]
That’s a commonly repeated fallacy. BPMF does not bring any closer to the “correct” pronunciation than pinyin does. It depends on how you learn it and what your native language is more than anything else, especially since all transcription methods, from BPMF to Wade-Giles to Hanyu Pinyin, are all nominally based on a Northeast China pronunciation which is just not spoken in Taiwan. That’s why 言, for example, is yán or ㄧㄢˊ, even though this not reflect at all how Taiwanese people pronounce it, which in IPA would be more like ɪɛn (my IPA is a little rusty, so that may be slightly wrong.)
It’s pretty ridiculous for an entire country of people to be holding themselves to the standard of another country. Americans don’t say you’re wrong if you don’t use “Queen’s English,” so why should Taiwan do it? When nobody is doing things in the “standard” way, it’s time to redefine “standard.”[/quote]
I think that’s a design error more than anything. I don’t think people in the north say [ɪɛn] either. Even if there are people who says that way, it wouldn’t be standard mandarin, and it shouldn’t be written like that in Pinyin.
ーㄢ’s IPA is [ian]，when it should be pronounced as ーㄝㄣ [iɛn], I believe the reason is they simply don’t want Zhuyin to go over 3 symbols per word. Since they don’t want to create a new symbol for [iɛ], or [ɛn] they went with next closest thing. As for Yan why isn’t it Yen I have no idea.
There are other design errors that aren’t copied into Pinyin, such as Zhuyin’s ㄒㄩㄥ, IPA should be [ɕyŋ], but it is pronounces as ㄒㄨㄥ IPA [ɕʊŋ], in Pinyin it’s Xiong, instead of Xiüng.
That’s a commonly repeated fallacy.[/quote]
I think Kryten was saying that Zhuyin is useful because then other people can write down the correct pronunciation for you, not that learning it means you’ll pronounce Mandarin better than if you learn Pinyin (the common fallacy you refer to).
This is a tricky question because neither xiong nor ㄒㄩㄥ are correct; the vowels for both are wrong according to their respective systems. Both systems get like 90% of the way there and then are defeated by their own inconsistencies.
Zhuyin’s alright, but I don’t see much point in a foreigner learning it if s/he already knows another input method for computers.
its more an absence of the ‘H’ sound. Taiwanese mostly find it slightly unnatural to curl their tongue when pronouncing words that require it. Therefor they just mainly dont. therefore ‘cheng shi’ becomes ‘ceng si’ and ‘zheng shi’ becomes ‘zeng si’. pronunciation such as ‘zhe’ becomes ‘ze’ , ‘zhi’ becomes ‘zi’ . Anyway this is only my humble understanding.
regards.
That’s a commonly repeated fallacy. BPMF does not bring any closer to the “correct” pronunciation than pinyin does.[/quote]
Although this is an “old” post this warrants a comment: the reason why Zhuyin Fuhao is said to be easier for learning Mandarin than Hanyu Pinyin is not because it is intrinsically better than any other system but because it isnot based on Latin letters and therefore sidesteps the interference that occurs (to varying degrees) in the minds of westerners when they see Latin letters associated with Mandarin sounds. For exactly this reason (so as to avoid this kind of interference), most systems for learning Japanese are based on hiragana and katakana (the Japanese syllabaries similar to BPMF) instead of on ro:maji (Latin letters)!
Getting instructions and corrective feedback on your pronunciation (ideally from a speaker with native or near native proununciation competency) is necessary in any case, regardless of which transliteration system you use…!
This can be quickly sidestepped by saying ‘the letters of hanyu pinyin don’t represent the sounds of English’. It’s not a complex thing for learners to understand for speakers of any language to understand that the letters have different sounds in different languages: letters, particularly vowels represent different sounds in different languages anyway. // sounds different in lots of different languages so most westerners would find it simple and obvious that // in pinyin wouldn’t sound like Italian or Icelandic /*/ because it didn’t sound the same as their first first language when they learned English or Spanish.
Most of the interference doesn’t exist because of the notation symbols, it comes because the mind maps sounds to the nearest available in the existing system.
Hanyu pinyin is just easier to learn for ‘westerners’ and people who are most at ease with the Roman alphabet. And I’d bet that 99% of ‘westerners’ learn zhuyin fuhao by writing either hanyu pinyin or their own made up pinyin next to the symbols anyway which begs the question ‘why not just use the pinyin in the first place?’. The answer is of course cultural: you want a language system to be understandable by the people you want to use it with, and Taiwanese people understand zhuyin fuhao.
Just learn both. It doesn’t take long and it isn’t complex. One for utility in self-study, one for using with Taiwanese people.
[quote=“willow_112233”]its more an absence of the ‘H’ sound. Taiwanese mostly find it slightly unnatural to curl their tongue when pronouncing words that require it. Therefor they just mainly dont. therefore ‘cheng shi’ becomes ‘ceng si’ and ‘zheng shi’ becomes ‘zeng si’. pronunciation such as ‘zhe’ becomes ‘ze’ , ‘zhi’ becomes ‘zi’ . Anyway this is only my humble understanding.
regards.[/quote]
I know I will get flamed for this, but I will say it anyways:
What you described is a vile bastardisation. It leads to real problems for people, I witnessed that a few times. Often 十 becomes 四 and more than once the simple task of making an appointment over the phone was an impossibility for Taiwanese office girls. They would eventually send a LINE message with the exact time.
The problem is that with zh=>z or ch=>c the pronunciation no longer reflects the character and you will have the same pronunciation for two entirely different words. That is not a new dialect or variation, but non-native speaker mistakes of those whose first language is Minnanhua.
Agreed. I learned zhuyin fuhao out of necessity to send text messages in Chinese because my cheap little cell phone required it to produce traditional characters. I could use pinyin, but it would only produce simplified. Even though I became adept at using BPMF, I was happy to go back to pinyin once I got my smart phone.
I take it you don’t know many Japanese- or Korean-speaking Westerners, then? I studied both in college (Japanese for years, Korean only for a semester), and my classes were filled with people making Anglicized pronunciations despite having learned hiragana/katana and hangul, respectively.
It’s really strange to see advanced Japanese students capable of writing short essays in the language and very competent at grammatically conversations, but their pronunciation still sounds like “Wata-shee wa America-gene dess.” The problem is with the learner or the teacher, not the orthography.
(PS, my secret weapon argument when Taiwanese people say pinyin is “not accurate”: Explain the 1.3 billion Chinese people who speak the language and learned pronunciation in pinyin.)
I’m not surprised. And i’m also not disagreeing with you, as you will see in a moment…
I’d say, for students of any given language to learn its pronunciation they need at least
The most important point we need to keep in mind in this context is that learning the pronunciation of words and phrases in a given language has in principle nothing to do with writing (witness how all children and also many adults anywhere in the world learn to speak one or more languages without any writing system being involved), but in practice, at least in the “developed countries”, most learners of a second/ foreign language are concurrently introduced to the sounds of the new language and the associated writing system, and thus it is often difficult to recognise and address the various problems that show up in the process (this simultaneity has advantages and disadvantages, but it seems very few language teachers/schools seem to care about any of this).
My experience is that people whose native language is written in a phonemic/phonetic system often have certain difficulties learning the pronunciation of a second language using the same writing system because of interference from the writing system they think they already know (and i had been addressing only those additional difficulties in my previous comments - if you read them that way you will see that we agree about the point you make, namely that otherwise existing difficulties in learning the pronunciation of a new language have nothing to do with any writing system).
Not surprisingly, native speakers of a language of which the associated writing system is either not phonemic/phonetic (e.g., Mandarin, Japanese to some extent) or which uses non-Latin characters (e.g., Korean, Japanese, Russian to some extent), encounter these additional difficulties when learning a third language - assuming here that the second and third language they learn both use the same writing system. That is to say, people who have learned the pronunciation of any one of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and who also know how to read in that language will only encounter the abovementioned additional difficulties when they learn another language with the same writing system: second language pronunciation tends to interfere significantly with third language pronunciation (a textbook case of this is Japan: in students in school learn Latin letters as one of the tools with which one can represent Japanese sounds (ro:maji), and after that they learn English. Not surprising, most Japanese speak - definitely read - English with a ro:maji accent! 
In contrast, native speakers of Mandarin or Japanese who learn the respective other language don’t experience a comparable negative impact of the writing system they know on the new pronunciation they are trying to learn - i suspect, the reason is that (consciously or unconsciously) it is understood that what is written and how people pronounce their language it has no intrinsic connection.
… off of the OP’s initial topic of pronunciation (which I can’t at all comment on), I wanted to respond to the zhuyin thing, since I do have personal experience with that.
I’m in China currently and I am not learning Mandarin formally right now. But when I decided to try learning casually and became aware of the existence of zhuyin, it appealed to me for the reasons that Yuli brought up.
I learned Spanish and German in school and am very comfortable reading in both. So it’s not that I have an issue with the simple notion that “letters in other languages make different sounds” 
. Even things like the double L in Spanish sounding like a Y, or umlauts in German… no problem. But I got SOOOO mixed up when I tried to tackle pinyin at first, and I don’t know why. In the end, I just found it easier to understand things through zhuyin.
Does that help the fact that I’m STILL largely tone deaf though? No lol. Also, a downside to being a zhuyin fan here is that it’s useless in China. When I get help written out for me, it comes in the form of pinyin (which I’m still basically illiterate with).
While I DIDN’T find pinyin easier, you’re absolutely correct in how you described one of the crutches I, personally, used when first learning zhuyin though. Whereas I didn’t even want to attempt writing out fake pinyin alongside real pinyin as a tool, because I felt that had the potential to do more harm than good.
Also, I recognize that maybe I’d wrap my head around things differently had I been in an actual class setting - it’s hard to know.
[quote=“Speeves”]Is it just me or do Taiwanese often change the ng final into a plain n? For example 城市 chengshi will become chenshi. Or for example 正式 zhengshi will become zhenshi.
It doesn’t bother me too much in that all languages have regional accents and they are neither right nor wrong. God knows I understand Taiwanese accented Chinese better than the Beijing variety. However my problem is when I pronounce (what I believe to be) the more standard and correct pronunciation as taught in text books only to have people not understand what I am saying and sometimes tell me I am wrong and try to correct my pronunciation.
So what I want to ask is: Has anyone else noticed this pronunciation difference? Do many locals not know what the mainland pronunciation sounds like or am I pronouncing my words wrong?[/quote]
Back to the original post, although I often hear people speak with a Taiwanese accent (eg. sh>s, ch>c, zh>z, etc.) I’ve never had anyone “correct” me when I speak with a more standard/mainland/whatever accent. In class, of course, my (native Taiwanese) teacher will make sure we differentiate between the above sounds, but sometimes when she’s not in careful “teacher mode” she’ll naturally revert to a Taiwanese accent.
For simple day-to-day tasks I try to make sure my pronunciation is how I’ve been taught in class, especially when I’m communicating important matters like numbers and such. After five years here I can usually understand the Taiwanese accent without a problem; in fact, when I’m with my Taiwanese friends for an extended period I tend to copy their pronunciation (especially if I’ve been drinking!). I think this is pretty natural.
BTW, I’ve had this exact experience many times in my elevator:
[ul]A: “Jǐ lóu?”
Me: “Shí lóu.”
A: (About to press 4) “Sì lóu…”
Me: “SHÍ lóu.”
A: (Changing to 10) “Ah, sí lóu”
[/ul]
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]
(PS, my secret weapon argument when Taiwanese people say pinyin is “not accurate”: Explain the 1.3 billion Chinese people who speak the language and learned pronunciation in pinyin.)[/quote]
Do the Chinese begin with pinyin in primary school as a tool to know how to pronounce their language? I believe that’s the analogy you’re making, which I would find surprising. Everyone is aware that China’s only preferred romanization is Hanyu Pinyin, but are they indeed learning pinyin first at a very young age in order to study their language?
[quote=“silas”][quote=“Hokwongwei”]
(PS, my secret weapon argument when Taiwanese people say pinyin is “not accurate”: Explain the 1.3 billion Chinese people who speak the language and learned pronunciation in pinyin.)[/quote]
Do the Chinese begin with pinyin in primary school as a tool to know how to pronounce their language? I believe that’s the analogy you’re making, which I would find surprising. Everyone is aware that China’s only preferred romanization is Hanyu Pinyin, but are they indeed learning pinyin first at a very young age in order to study their language?[/quote]
indeed they do
chinese-forums.com/index.php … g-to-read/
Remember that pinyin is 100% phonetic. The sound could represent many characters.
It’s somehow reassuring to know that over a billion people in China are also saddled with learning a foreign system in order to approach studying their language in the early stages. I would imagine that Zhuyin Fuhao has less of a chance of holding ground as a teaching tool here for foreign language learners, despite its preferred status now. As more people are starting to study Chinese than at any point before in history, this adds new demand on language schools to meet their needs, which include reducing unnecessary complexity. With the growing importance of Chinese and increasingly more courses offered worldwide, Zhuyin seems set to appear an antiquated and a cumbersome addition to the process, a poor fit for a vast majority familiar with roman letters. I agree it has its advantages, but it’s less accessible and –- the main point I’m making -– increasingly in the extreme minority.
Hanyu Pinyin was developed by a committee of Chinese linguists, led by Zhou Youguang.
Thanks Taffy, however by foreign system, I was referring to the roman syllabary which Hanyu Pinyin is comprised of. Recently a string of articles appeared on the BBC website and elsewhere on Zhou Youguang as “The Father of Hanyu Pinyin”, I believe in conjunction with the release of a major new lexicon…all a subject area that rarely garnered much attention or space on such sites 10 years ago, but it’s a different world now.
Silas makes good points. I would add that Chinese language education is getting to be very competitive. Taiwan had a monopoly for some time as China was largely closed off and Westerners regarded its institutions with suspicion, but in the past 20 or 30 years, mainland language centers have far overtaken their Taiwanese counterparts. To stay competitive, Taiwan’s need to switch to pinyin or risk being marginalized even further.