Or maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. In any event I can tell you that what Derek1978 said made no sense whatsoever. Focus on tone rather than pitch? How is that possible? Pitch is an essential element of tone along with volume and length as well as some other mysterious qualities that nobody has labelled yet I don’t imagine. If he had said focus on the “variation in pitch” in your own vocal range rather than on your pitch relative to somebody else’s it would have made more sense. Heck, he would have hit it dead on if he had explained that volume increases as the pitch rises and that there is a significant difference in the amount of time it takes to pronounce the different tones. First is the longest if I recall followed closely by three, then two, four and finally five which takes no time at all.
I apologize for the tone mistake on xie xie. I was reading the pinyin text as reference which had NO 5th tone mark. BPMF does have the mark. Moving along…
What I meant by “pitch” is:
I often hear beginners (male) speaking in a soprano voice when saying 1st tone or 2nd tone; during the upward movement for 2nd tone their voice become rediculously high pitched nad they sound like a boy in puberty or a girl screaming…then they quickly become a baritone when they say 3rd and 4th tone; during the downward movement for 3rd and 4th tone they become hardly audible. This is not needed. You should just pick one pitch that suits your voice comfortably…your normal speaking voice. Then learn to adjust the tone from that level.
We can all argue which system is best for us until we are blue in the face…but what it boils down to is what each individual is comfortable with is fine for themselves. Each system has its flaws and each system has its advantages.
The Taiwanese take ownership pride in BPMF because that is what they have been taught all their lives starting in kindie. To them, Pinyin is from the mainland which makes it an enemy of their way of speaking. I have asked many Taiwanese about this and it really is a matter of pride…the response is: “you are living in Taiwan, we speak learning BPMF so if you want to learn Taiwanese Mandarin then use our system…if you want to learn Mainland chinese, use pinyin, and no one will understand you here.”
Do I agree with this? No. But this is why BPMF is engrained into all the beginning level mandarin courses in Taiwan.
I wont and dont pretend to be fluent or have expertese on the matter…all of this is based on personal experience over the past few months and my own opinion. Dont slam me saying I dont know what Im talking about when we are just sharing opinions…jeesh. 
Stupid people say stupid things. That was a great example.
Almost right. There’s nothing intrinsically related to the sort of accent you will pick up by which system you use, it is all about the sounds you assign different representations.
And yes, learning iin Taiwan you basically have to learn BPMF. Nothing at all lwromng with that. However, just so I don’t end up on Cranky’s shitlist I better add that it is useful to know pinyin as well.
HG
[quote=“derek1978”]Pin Yin is for wusies :raspberry:
Learning BPMF may look intimidating at first, but it will stop you from brain reverting back to English pronounciation. Take some time to learn BPMF (most can do it in a week or two) and you will be speaking more correctly.
[/quote]
Errrm, aside from the fact that BPMF is ONLY used on some little backwater island off the southern coast of china 
…one which, in fact, can’t even get its act together to the point of getting romanizations consistent on freeway signs (come off it, how hard is it to pick a system and STICK WITH IT, lol)…
Stupid people say stupid things. That was a great example.[/quote]
Give the guy a break. He’s not an expert on the issue but is simply sharing his personal experience (albeit with some false impressions). The fact is that bpmf is helpful for derek1978, so good for him. It may be helpful for others out there as well.
Derek, what HGC says is true. Bpmf and Pinyin are equivalent systems. Learning one or the other will not make one sound more Taiwanese or Mainland. Besides, bpmf was invented on the Mainland and first took root there.
I agree with you there, D.
[quote=“derek1978”]The Taiwanese take ownership pride in BPMF because that is what they have been taught all their lives starting in kindie. To them, Pinyin is from the mainland which makes it an enemy of their way of speaking. I have asked many Taiwanese about this and it really is a matter of pride…the response is: “you are living in Taiwan, we speak learning BPMF so if you want to learn Taiwanese Mandarin then use our system…if you want to learn Mainland chinese, use Pinyin, and no one will understand you here.”
Do I agree with this? No. But this is why BPMF is engrained into all the beginning level Mandarin courses in Taiwan.[/quote]
You’re right not to agree with it. It’s perfectly possible to learn very accurate Taiwanese Mandarin having never learnt zhuyin (as HGC, sjcma and others have said). Both systems represent the language unambiguously. In my experience the vast majority of Taiwanese have no idea about Pinyin and just make assumptions about its inferiority.
Personally I don’t see what the big deal is - it doesn’t take long to learn both systems. I learnt zhuyin first and then pinyin and personally I find pinyin is way way more useful to me in learning Chinese because of the speed I can read and write it (probably because my brain is wired that way). But like I say - once you know one system it doesn’t take very long at all to learn another. 
I really don’t get it. It’s easy.
I managed to get a decent grasp of the concept of pin yin in under an hour. A little more practice over a few more hours helped me to refine my pronounciation- tones came shortly after that.
Can people not get their head around the fact that pin yin is not English? Spanish, french, and many other languages that use romanization have letters which are pronounced differently to English.
[quote=“Dragonbones”]
To which fluent speakers’ argument dost thou refer, oh one with edible legs best pan fried in olive oil?[/quote]
i see…your cooking techniques are as bad as my language learning ones… 
well,thankyou all for the imput, we are starting lessons this week, so i guess the teacher will have us started with pinyin,
i now feel ashamed to have asked a question without looking up how to use pinyin,but others might have done the same.
all in all,it has transpired that pinyin isn’t as easy as it could have been.
and as Tom Hill correctly pointed out,local accents are making the task even harder,i’ve already been told to have a peasan’s tone…nice :s
Anyway, what sounds does “shee-shiey” represent? “she-shy”? “she-she”? “she-shay”?
I can’t think of how it would be pronounced in Taichung. Can anyone explain it to me more precisely?
That might be true of a few Neanderthals but from my experience with a little more educated people perhaps is that they are quite fascinated to see a foriegner write something down faster than than could with characters. I get Taiwanese asking me about Pinyin all the time. We should be encouraging the system because the sooner it is learned and accepted the easier it will be for everybody, especially, but not only, us.
On a similar note, with a pinyin-based dictionary I can often find a character or compound in a mere 4-5 seconds, at which point a local would still be searching for the index page with the bu4shou3. I’ve held many a lookup race with locals to prove the point: 5 seconds vs. 30-60 seconds for them (of course, they’re using an unfamiliar dictionary, but still…). I have even converted a couple of them to the ABC series of dictionaries after such comparisons. 
Not everyone gets their head around that fact. 
Learning French in high school as a very shy boy, I just wouldn’t bother asking the teacher how certain words were pronounced. Instead, I used English pronounciation as a crutch and I managed make it through two years of this torture (always barely passing on my oral tests). Now if French was written in gibberish, I’m sure I would have done better in my pronounciation because in order to pass, I would actually have to learn how to properly pronounce the gibberish.
The situation is different for most people here though. I was trying to do the least and get away with it while most people here appear to actually want to learn Chinese.
Not quite a fair comparison. You gotta compare a Pinyin based dictionary versus a Zhuyin based dictionary. Granted there’s not a plethora of Zhuyin based dictionaries out there, but I do have one. 
In my older dictionaries, I’ve even looked stuff up in the Wade-Giles index. I can just hear cranky laowai now, “the horror…the horror…”.
There are other quirks about Taiwanese Mandarin. For example…ㄦ (er) : Put it at the end of noun and you are speaking mainland Chinese. Omit it from your dialogue altogether and you are speaking Taiwanese Mandarin.
My school teaches us to use it [ㄦ (er)] because it needs to be taught, but they caution us not to use it while speaking in Taiwan. I guess it is nice they are giving us the full spectrum of Mandarin and not just the Taiwanese version.
My school actually teaches pinyin and BPMF together; they leave it up to us to pick which one to use. This is great; however, my observation of first year students who chose pinyin is that they trip up more easily on pronunciation. I am not saying all students do this…some of them pick it up easily right away, but the majority of students I have met get confused when they see things such as:
ei (ㄟ) = They see the “e” and think it is pronounced “e (ㄜ)” and they see the “i” and think it is pronounced “i (一)”.
This results in a few seconds of stumbling, a few ummms, and then finally someone in the class whispers the right answer and a light goes on in their head as to the right pronunciation.
The students who chose to use BPMF do not hesitate at all and can whip out the right answer quickly.
Like I said before, each system has its advantages and disadvantages based on personal learning habits. I just see way more confusion in Pinyin than I do in BPMF. In BPMF you don’t have to worry about changing or omitting vowels when combining syllables, and you don’t have to worry about confusing roman alphabet pronunciation with pinyin pronunciation.
[quote=“Chris”]Anyway, what sounds does “shee-shiey” represent? “she-shy”? “she-she”? “she-shay”?
I can’t think of how it would be pronounced in Taichung. Can anyone explain it to me more precisely?[/quote]
when i wrote “shee-shiey” it was in “english”,so if you read this as you would for an english word,you’d get an idea.
i heard it as “see siey” too sometimes,altought it might have been from the speaker’s speech impediment :s
On a side note…
I just found out today that my GF actually learned English using BPMF pronunciation. 
Her English is very near perfect, so I am amazed that she wasn’t confused during the process. She has been speaking / learning English only since age 14 (she is 24 now). 10 years to fluency is pretty darn good considering she has not had immersion by living overseas and has only lived / studied in Taiwan.
So for all you BPMF nay sayers outh there…if you think BPMF is good for nothing, think again! Haha.
[quote=“dablindfrog”][quote=“Chris”]Anyway, what sounds does “shee-shiey” represent? “she-shy”? “she-she”? “she-shay”?
I can’t think of how it would be pronounced in Taichung. Can anyone explain it to me more precisely?[/quote]
when i wrote “[color=darkred]shee-shiey[/color]” it was in “English”,so if you read this as you would for an English word,you’d get an idea.
i heard it as “see siey” too sometimes,altought it might have been from the speaker’s speech impediment :s[/quote]
I would find it extremely hard, if not impossible, to pronounce this vowel combination using english pronunciation. “siey” the “y” would have to be silent…so if you are inventing your own pinyin system, why bother writing it? the “ie” you wrote takes care of it on its own…kind of. Best not to invent your own system, its going to trip you up if you are taking classes.
Pick a system and stick with it. Learn both if you can.
I knew that. 
I would have still beat the pants off them, though. 
Unfortunatley, I can derive a lot of possible English pronunciations from “shiey”.
Is the “i” pronounced as in “kin”, “king” or “kite”? (/I/, /i/, /ai/)
Is the “ie” pronoicned together as in “tie” or “brie”? (/ai/, /i/)
Or is the “e” separate as in “bet”, “beta” (AmEng) or the “ea” in “beat”? (/E/, /e/, /i/)
Is the “ey” pronounced together as in “they” or in “monkey”? (/ei/ or /i/)
Or is the “y” separate as in “fly”, “Flynn” or “kitty”? (/ai/, /I/, /i/)
(Perhaps we should use IPA!)