Over one thousand syllables had to be corrected one by one (or did you work with individual words?). Wow! You certainly are patient. Thanks for offering your input method. 
[/quote]
I entered each possible syllable manually, around 1200 of them. It took three or four weeks in my spare time. I probably no longer have the original file, though.
That would be great, but could it be incorporated into my autocorrect .acl file, which also has zillions of corrections? (such as “exxpeienc” for “experience”)
Prety mcuh everu time I meake a typoo wehn I tpye fast, I add it to Autocreertct! 
Hmm… somebody over at Chinese-forums.com has produced an input method for Windows which should do all of this without any other requirement than installing the input method. And it should work in all Windows software. I’ve never used it because…
(… drum roll please …)
… I’m a Linux user and I use scim’s zh-pinyin input method for that purpose.
I think this is the relevant thread:
Unless someone was smart enough to know how to merge the two files, no. Mine would replace yours. But you could manually add the 1200 or so entries to yours just the way I created mine. It would only take you all of January. 
Tonal spelling? Use TOP. (Must you force me to say this again?? 
) Same as Hanyu Pinyin, but shows the tones. Absolutely great for teaching and learning (if I do say so myself, and since no one else will, guess it falls to me.)
My sixth-graders get both TOP and color-coding. Their tones are amazing – and they have never had a separate pronunciation lesson either for sounds or tones. They constantly correct me if I try to write a tone with the wrong color marker, even if the TOP is correct.
[quote=“ironlady”]Tonal spelling? Use TOP. (Must you force me to say this again?? ) Same as Hanyu Pinyin, but shows the tones. Absolutely great for teaching and learning (if I do say so myself, and since no one else will, guess it falls to me.)
My sixth-graders get both TOP and color-coding. Their tones are amazing – and they have never had a separate pronunciation lesson either for sounds or tones. They constantly correct me if I try to write a tone with the wrong color marker, even if the TOP is correct. [/quote]
Only drawback I can think of with TOP is that you can’t write it in all-caps!
See? It even promotes Netiquette. I’ll have to add that to the promotional materials! 
[quote=“ironlady”]Tonal spelling? Use TOP. (Must you force me to say this again?? ) Same as Hanyu Pinyin, but shows the tones. Absolutely great for teaching and learning (if I do say so myself, and since no one else will, guess it falls to me.)
My sixth-graders get both TOP and color-coding. Their tones are amazing – and they have never had a separate pronunciation lesson either for sounds or tones. They constantly correct me if I try to write a tone with the wrong color marker, even if the TOP is correct. [/quote]
What is TOP?
A system developed by Ironlady in 1995 which varies the capitalization to represent tones. The key is that the pattern formed by the capitalization VISUALLY represents the pitch modulation of the tones.
[quote="ironlady"]FIRST TONES ARE WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS. YOUR VOICE IS HIGH.
seconD toneS arE writteN witH thE lasT letteR capitalizeD. that'S becausE youR voicE haS tO risE.
third tones are written all lower case. that's because the voice is low. (let's keep discussions on the true nature of third and half-third tones somewhere else -- this system is just to help us poor foreigners internalize tones! :slight_smile: )
Fourth Tone Has The First Letter Of Each Word Capitalized, Because Your Voice Starts High And Then Falls Downward.
So, to write the phrase “wo3 mei3tian1 lian4xi2 han4yu3” you would write:
wo meiTIAN LianxI Hanyu[/quote]
Interesting system. You might give it a try and report back to us, but the appropriate thread for that discussion is HERE.
Source
[quote=“Dragonbones”]
So, to write the phrase “wo3 mei3tian1 lian4xi2 han4yu3” you would write:
wo meiTIAN LianxI Hanyu[/quote]
Can’t see why it would be a substitute for GR. Surely the idea of GR is to reinforce the point that tones are radically different sounds through use of radically different spelling.
The diacritics in Hanyu Pinyin make an excellent job of illustrating falling, rising etc in a graphically intuitive way. Obviously the number system is rubbish and has no mnemonic value at all, and TOP is much better than that if you a font/ typeface without diacritics. But these days everyone has unicode, and even MP3 players display just about anything: French, Chinese, definitely no problem with Pinyin.
No intrinsic mnemonic value, you’re right – but I find four numbers very easy to associate with the four tones, and once that association has been learned, they work perfectly well. I have no trouble reading pinyin with numbers attached, smoothly and effortlessly. 
I like the tone marks on HP best, though.
It’s all individual; what works well for one may not work for another. The ‘diacritic’ tone markers stuffed me up when I first started learning because I associated them with the Thai tones which are different to Mandarin’s. ironlady’s system looks great to me, but I’ve never tried it.
Amen. There is no right or wrong.
I had the same problem in reverse, as I learned Thai 2nd. It was very irritating.
Same here.
OK. I haven’t tried learning Thai or other tonal languages… I just looked at wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet#Diacritics and Thai tone sounds horrendous: the government official transcription system doesn’t even attempt to show tone! In actual written Thai, tone is sometimes shown, the rest of the time you have to work it out for yourself. And when it is shown, the same diacritic can represent low and falling tone, or high and falling tone, depending on the initial consonant class. This –้ (the diacritic above the hyphen) is the symbol for either Falling or High, apparently.
Talk about counterintuitive… and it’s not even as if Thai has got loads of tones like Taiwanese, difficult to show unambiguously.
If you record very slow Chinese, and display the pitch (fundamental frequency) curve in a speech analysis program, you get shapes that look more or less like the diacritics themselves. So, 4th tone starts at a high pitch, and goes down to a low pitch, just like th shape of a grave accent. 1st tone has a flat pitch, just like the macron ¯. This is a design feature of the diacritic system of HP (and bopomofo, WG etc).
In the link that smithsgj gave above, Wikipedia writes:
Sound familiar? No wonder people confuse Thailand and Taiwan.
[quote=“sjcma”]In the link that smithsgj gave above, Wikipedia writes:
Sound familiar? No wonder people confuse Thailand and Taiwan. [/quote]
And with Thai, some romanizations are based on pronunciation, and others on the underlying Sanskrit/Pali spellings (e.g. Ratchathewi vs. Rajadevi).
And there wouldn’t be an ‘i’ or ‘v’ pronounced anyway.
[quote=“smithsgj”]
If you record very slow Chinese, and display the pitch (fundamental frequency) curve in a speech analysis program, you get shapes that look more or less like the diacritics themselves. So, 4th tone starts at a high pitch, and goes down to a low pitch, just like th shape of a grave accent. 1st tone has a flat pitch, just like the macron ¯. This is a design feature of the diacritic system of HP (and bopomofo, WG etc).[/quote]
Well, first of all, the third tone that emerges in very slow Chinese is not representative of most of the third tones in the spoken language, so thatʻs a problem. Itʻs really pretty much a quick low tone, not a dipping low tone with a distinct drop and rise.
But aside from that – the fact is that English does not make use of diacritical marks of this sort in a way that is crucial to the meaning of words, so it is often going to be an afterthought at best to students. Yes, itʻs shaped like the tone. But if it can be easily left off, scratched over and replaced, itʻs not expressing the way that tone is an intrinsic part of the syllable in Chinese. And if you do tonal spelling and change the spellings or insert silent letters, youʻre not expressing the way that tones can vary without the phonetic (segmental) form of the syllable changing. Color would really be the “purest” way to express it (although obviously not feasible for printing and so on).
It’s the hau for 化 that’s more disturbing…
