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Scrap Pinyin - Go Bopomofo!? | ||
Tags: Writing System | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6357 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 1 of 6 05 August 2011 at 7:35pm | IP Logged |
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As the weak person I am, I must confess that I got helplessly charmed by the Taiwanese way of speaking Mandarin. :)
Since I love learning scripts, I got the idea that it could be fun to learn Mandarin completely through Bopomofo (Zhuyin Fuhao) instead of Pinyin. Sure, learning a new set of characters would be quite time-consuming compared to how easy it is to read romanized texts. On the other hand, I still need to learn all the new sounds of the language, so why not map them to a shiny new set of characters right from the start (and avoid some pronunciation biases that I might have)? For those of you who have studied Mandarin, what do you think about Pinyin? Would it be a very bad idea to avoid Pinyin altogether? And if that's the case - why? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5191 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 6 06 August 2011 at 10:10am | IP Logged |
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Actually, this is exactly the way I learned Chinese. I had a Chinese to English dictionary from Taiwan, and it provided the pronunciations only in the zhuyin notation.
An added benefit of learning zhuyin over pinyin is that you are forced to associate each symbol with its distinct pronunciation without any distractions from your L1. The problem with pinyin is that speakers of Western languages already have biases of how certain letters are pronounced, especially when it comes to pinyin combinations that spell real words in other languages: "si", "can", "she", "fang", etc. Also, pinyin has some problems with reuse of letters and issues of adjacency that take some getting used to: "lu" vs "lü" vs "wu" vs "qu", whereas Zhuyin is more consistent and component based. So, just as I feel that it is better to learn traditional characters first, I also feel that in the beginning the pronunciation system can be mastered more thoroughly by using a system not based on a western alphabet. Finally, I have nothing against pinyin and happen to favor it in the case of computer chats, like at zhongwen.com, because I can type it very rapidly without having to resort to a cumbersome lookup system or new keyboard mapping. However, sometimes I like to think that I could have designed pinyin to be more consistent, maybe by borrowing a few vowels from one of the Scandinavian alphabets. Edited by tibbles on 06 August 2011 at 10:20am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5696 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 4 of 6 07 August 2011 at 11:17am | IP Logged |
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@paranday
That's one of the greatest/worst language puns I've ever read, did you just come up with that? @m. medialis I started off with Taiwanese materials which uses zhuyin, and later on learned with pinyin. To be honest with you, there's hardly any difference between the two. All else being equal, choose whichever you like. However know that it's going to be much harder finding material using zhuyin; but on the plus side the material that does use it, is going to be using Taiwanese Standard Mandarin pronunciations (which are 99% the same, but differences do exist cf. 和、垃圾、企業) as well as Taiwanese word choice (again, pretty small differences). If that variant is aesthetically pleasing to you, then I say go for it. I agree that learning pinyin might result in some L1 interference, but I would argue no more so than knowing English b interferes with Spanish b. That is to say, not very much at all. If you do choose to go the zhuyin route, I would say you still ought to pick up pinyin, just because of its prevalence, but there's certainly no rush to do it now and by that time, it will be pretty trivial. In short, pick whatever pleases you more, it's not particularly important in the long run. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| seldnar Senior Member United States Joined 7132 days ago 189 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, French, Greek | Message 5 of 6 07 August 2011 at 8:39pm | IP Logged |
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I'm all in favor of zhuyin fuhao. But, I'm prejudiced; that's how I learned Mandarin
pronunciation in Taiwan. My first classes were at the Mandarin Daily News, a children's newspaper publisher. Their newspapers included the zhuyin for every word. I had a great teacher too. I had no problems picking up pinyin after that, because once I knew what sound "x" or "q" stood for, I never confused it with the English sound for that letter. Although my Taiwanese friends who didn't know pinyin but played a Three Kingdoms video game always wondered why Cao Cao was called, as they pronounced it, Kao Kao. The nice thing about pinyin, though, is that nearly every sign in Mainland China includes it. That meant I could pick up new characters easily. PS: I used to suppress giggles every time my Mandarin teacher would run through the first four sounds of zhuyin (note, to those who don't know it the first four characters are transcribed as Bo Po Mo Fo but pronounced closer to Buh, Puh, Muh, Fuh).Muh fuh. It made memorization fun :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5191 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 6 of 6 08 August 2011 at 9:54am | IP Logged |
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There are songs out there for teaching the order of the zhuyin fuhao:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Re32eyGwRo which comes in handy when you want to look up quickly a character via a phonetic index in the back of a Taiwanese dictionary. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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