Hey, John, you beat me to it. I have tried to teach English pronunciation with the KK system and immediately realised that the system is lousy. The disadvantages relative to the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) are that:
- [*]Dipthongs are represented by single characters, so you can't readily tell which symbols represent dipthongs and which represent single vowels.[*]There was another reason but I've forgotten it all of a sudden.[*]Oh, yes, I remember now - Long and short vowels are also represented by different symbols instead of the same symbol with or without a colon. With the IPA it's simple - Colon - long, no colon - short. With the KK system you just have to remember which is which, and of course most students don't.[/list]
Anyway, I’m sure the reason why the KK system was adopted was that the IPA spelling that Taiwnese students saw in their textbooks represented British received pronunciation*, which was not what people where hearing from their mostly North American teachers. That could be confusing. So someone had the bright idea of inventing a different system to represent American pronunciation, which was completely unnecessary, because American pronunciation can be represented perfectly adequately by the IPA…because it is what it says - international!
My native English pronunciation is British received pronunciation* with an optional Cockney/Estuary English variant. However, I have always given my students the option of learning American pronunciation. In mainland China they use the IPA. When I was teaching in a hotel in Beijing, I would tell the students what words were pronounced differently in British and American English, and write both pronunciations on the whiteboard using the IPA.
There is no need for KK at all. If you analyse your Taiwanese students’ pronunciation problems, you will realise that they are due in no small part to the inadequacies of the KK system. I say dump it along with Wade Giles and so-called “tongyong pinyin.”
*By the way, Wolf, we don’t say “Queen’s” or “King’s English” any more, because it sounds too feudalistic/imperialistic and not in keeping with the international nature of English today. These days we call it “received pronunciation” or RP, meaning that it is the standard “received” from our teachers and broadcast media.