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!)[/quote]
come along to the happy hour at alleycat and i’ll give you a live performance
The assumptions that Taiwanese make about HYPY are similar to those made by mainlanders about MPS. I’ve heard many a mainlander, including a few CSL teachers with MAs from BLCU, tell me until they were blue in the face that CSB et al speak crappy PTH because they were taught with MPS. They insist the MPS system isn’t accurate and that it doesn’t include all the sounds of PTH, which is a complete load of BS.
If you want to go around confusing your brain by using a romanized alphabet system to read madarin…by all means knock yourself out. But, I warn you that you are going to one huge headache at the end of the day.
If you want to read actual chinese characters the way they should be read, then use the MPS system. 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]
Why do you think this? First, BPM is not intimidating. It can be learned in a day.
Second, every possible “word” in both the pinyin and the BPM systems possesses a unique one-to-one correspondence with a syllable in Chinese. As another poster pointed out long ago, at the phonemic level they are equally precise. There is literally no difference between them.
third, pinyin is not chinese transliterated into english. it is chinese transliterated into the latin alphabet that english shares with eleventy billion other languages. If pinyin does not agree with english phonetics at every point this might be one reason why.
fourth, I don’t know anyone seriously studying chinese whose brain is “confused” by the shared use of the latin alphabet by pinyin and english. German and French are also written in variations of the latin alphabet. Is this a serious obstacle to anyone studying these languages?
fifth, mainland chinese get along just fine with pinyin. they use it chat online and input characters in computers. taiwan invented BPM mostly to distinguish itself in a small way from the mainland chinese. it works just as nicely as pinyin, but it is a political alphabet and if it had never existed we would not miss its absence.
Sorry to rant on, but this entire debate is silly.
I think BPMF has its value in same cases. In Taiwan-published books for children for example you have BPMF as pronounciation help alongside Chinese characters. I think in this case BPMF takes up less space than HYPY would.
For us foreigners learning Chinese, however, a system based on Western letters is always preferable. It just makes recognition and memorizing of prounounciation much faster. It’s just how our brains work, I guess.
It’s true that mainland Chinese have no problem using Hanyu Pinyin for conversation (for example in MSN chats) and they have no problem whatsoever with writing their own name or a Chinese place name with it, while Taiwanese have no clue about what method they are supposed to use. It’s unbelievable and rediculous how messy the whole transliteration situation is in Taiwan considering that all of Mainland China uses only one system.
[quote=“beautifulspam”]fifth, mainland chinese get along just fine with Pinyin. they use it chat online and input characters in computers. taiwan invented BPM mostly to distinguish itself in a small way from the mainland chinese. it works just as nicely as Pinyin, but it is a political alphabet and if it had never existed we would not miss its absence.
Sorry to rant on, but this entire debate is silly.[/quote]
I agreed with most of your post, apart from this point. Zhuyin (bpmf) is not political as it predates both Hanyu Pinyin and the Chinese Communist Party itself. The reasons for keeping it, on the other hand, may be part politics, part inertia.
As for the debate being silly, I thought that was what Forumosa was for?
Actually, this objection to pinyin really was brought up by hardcore PRC “patriots” back in the day.
Both BPMF and HYPY are equally accurate and effective in representing Mandarin.
For me, I find HYPY very useful for things like Chinese input, jotting down pronunciations, and looking things up in the dictionary. I already know where the letters are on a keyboard, and using BPMF for the above purposes slows me down by a factor of 10.
I find BPMF very useful for verifying pronunciations with locals (retroflex? -n or -ng? f- or h-?), or for learning the pronunciations of obscure characters that even the locals need to have accompanied by BPFM - occasionally you see them on signs of businesses.
So in my case, it has profited to learn both systems, but for different reasons.
[quote]I agreed with most of your post, apart from this point. Zhuyin (bpmf) is not political as it predates both Hanyu Pinyin and the Chinese Communist Party itself. The reasons for keeping it, on the other hand, may be part politics, part inertia.
As for the debate being silly, I thought that was what Forumosa was for? [/quote]
Oops! According to wikipedia bopomofo predates the communist party by 5 years. I found more information in the article.
[quote]
On the Chinese mainland, Zhuyin Fuhao was superseded by the pinyin system promulgated by the People’s Republic of China, although the pronunciation of words in standard dictionaries are given in both pinyin and Zhuyin.
The ROC Education Ministry has attempted for many years to phase out the use of Zhuyin in favor of a system based on Roman characters (see MPS II). However, this transition has been extremely slow due to the difficulty in teaching elementary school teachers a new Roman-based system.[/quote]
:eh:
This if true is just plain crazy. I have taught a group of young junior high teachers to read and write pinyin in a single 90 minute class.
And yet I have a teacher at shida who subtracts points for this! Despite my sloppy pinyin I have the best pronunciation in the class…why oh why must she pick my nits?
Heck that’s nothing. I once taught an entire elementary school, the teachers and administrative staff to read and write Pinyin in just under three minutes. From that moment on they could give 100% perfect pronunciations to any word written in Pinyin and they could snatch words out of running conversation and find them in their dictionary within seconds. Now, mind you, I had a hang over that day so lord only knows what I could have done otherwise. Incredible, just incredible. You should see me go!
Zhuyin Fuhao (bpmf) was invented on the mainland during a time when Taiwan was still Japanese soil. The reason it is still around is due to inertia. For typing, Zhuyin requires less keystrokes on average than Pinyin.
Zhuyin has served the population well for many years now. Romanization simply does not offer a sufficient amount of advantage for the local population to convince them to be passionate about switching wholesale. For most locals, phonetics is simply a tool for learning characters. It’s a means to an end and not an end in itself. PRC was able to impose Pinyin because that’s the beauty of an authoritarian government. Wade-Giles was the standard in Taiwan for so many years under authoritarian rule, but ever since democracy got a foothold on the island, the romanization situation has gone to hell.
It is both politics and the lack of political will that has created the current situation. Even though many beginners may think that this is a linguistics issue, romanization has, unfortunately, become a political issue. Tongyong Pinyin, imoh, is a system born mostly out of politics. (It’s also Chris’s favourite romanization scheme, btw). Legislators are unwilling to impose a system on the populace because no matter which one they choose, they’ll upset people and lose votes. It’s simply not an issue that’s important enough to lose votes over.
I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree with you here. Typing in zhuyin requires changing out of the IME every time you want to type a comma, period, question mark, semicolon, or number… and then switch back to the zhuyin IME to continue typeing characters. It also requires a tone for every character, instead of guessing from context, like most pinyin IMEs do. I’m pretty fast with zhuyin, but it takes a heck of a lot more keystrokes than pinyin would.
I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree with you here. Typing in zhuyin requires changing out of the IME every time you want to type a comma, period, question mark, semicolon, or number… and then switch back to the zhuyin IME to continue typeing characters. It also requires a tone for every character, instead of guessing from context, like most Pinyin IMEs do. I’m pretty fast with zhuyin, but it takes a heck of a lot more keystrokes than Pinyin would.[/quote]
That depends on the IME software you’re using. A superior system would not require you to do all that.
I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree with you here. Typing in zhuyin requires changing out of the IME every time you want to type a comma, period, question mark, semicolon, or number… and then switch back to the zhuyin IME to continue typeing characters. It also requires a tone for every character, instead of guessing from context, like most Pinyin IMEs do. I’m pretty fast with zhuyin, but it takes a heck of a lot more keystrokes than Pinyin would.[/quote]
Nothing wrong with disagreeing.
If you’re comparing the IME that comes for free in Windows, I would agree with you that the Window’s Zhuyin IME has much to be desired – esp. in the punctuation department.
However, there are third party IMEs that allow quite a bit of customization which includes all the features you mention for Pinyin. Given the same feature set, Zhuyin requires fewer keystrokes on average. Zhuyin also allows you to get away with certain typos. For example, if you want to type “zhuang / ㄓㄨㄤ”, one couldn’t exactly type “gnauhz” and expect it to work. In Zhuyin, you can type ㄤㄨㄓ and it can still work (depending on software and setting, of course).
Since I’m already more used to zhuyin input, the idea of a zhuyin IME that didn’t require switching out of it to type numbers and punctuation marks sounds GREAT!
[quote=“Xiaoma”]Since I’m already more used to zhuyin input, the idea of a zhuyin IME that didn’t require switching out of it to type numbers and punctuation marks sounds GREAT!
Which zhuyin IME do you suggest?[/quote]
Actually, I use the Windows IME myself because I rarely have the need to type Chinese and hence, cannot justify the cost of a third party IME. I don’t remember the brand name of the one that I tried except to say that it was part of a package that came with a writing pad for handwriting recognition input.
There are free open source Zhuyin IMEs. You can download it for free at Chewing. Get it? Chewing=Zhuyin. I don’t know if it’s any good though, but it does get continuous upgrades.
Every character I learn, I use in a sentence and I write it in bpm, pinyin, mandarin and include an English translation (if I think I need it). Nobody told me to do this, I’m just concerned about getting the tones and pronounciation right, as well as some grammar points. I hope to continue doing this, as both pinyin and bpm are (I think) valid ways to understand the parts of the language.
If I could just stop making mistakes with my character writing I would be a bit happier. My reading and speaking is great but writing is tough.
I used bpm to help one of my students understand how to pronounce a vocab word the other day. Interesting results. Not sure if it’s a good idea to do that. She seemed happy.
