vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German
| Message 9 of 11 26 November 2013 at 1:07pm | IP Logged |
Ari wrote:
People who speak Mandarin with an accent can have difficulty knowing for example which characters have the pinyin "si" and which have the pinyin "shi", since they pronounce them the same way. |
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That is why "modern" input methods for Mandarin have some "fuzzy" pinyin feature under the hood, whereby typing "s" will also give "sh" results (same for other commonly confused pairs of Mandarin phonemes). But obviously that doesn't solve everything.
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Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin
| Message 10 of 11 26 November 2013 at 9:41pm | IP Logged |
Many of the people that I've met from the mainland mentioned using pinyin in school and then forgetting most of it afterward. The ones that retain it either use a pinyin IME, or work as Mandarin instructors. The ones that use finger stroke input do so for their IME and not to do dictionary look ups. I gather that most of them do not use electronic dictionaries due to some experiences being unable to find entries. They also generally do not guess at the pronunciation. That said, most of these people attended Chinese universities so I'm guessing that anything they'd look up is probably pretty advanced, or used infrequently.
Edited by Snowflake on 26 November 2013 at 9:55pm
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shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4442 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French
| Message 11 of 11 02 December 2013 at 12:42am | IP Logged |
Unlike English, when you don't have an alphabet, it is more difficult to remember characters off your head. In my
parents' generation they rely on remembering the radicals specific characters belongs to. In the dictionary there
are pronunciation guides for people. A typical dictionary in Chinese Hong Kong would have the Cantonese, Pinyin
& Taiwanese BPMF pronunciation guide. Chinese dictionaries are listed by radicals & # strokes it takes to write
characters. With an online dictionary like www.mdbg.net all the characters are
listed in Pinyin alphabetic order and you can click on the pronunciation button to hear each character.
When I am typing something on computer, I don't need to remember even half the characters. I can use an online
dictionary with the English meaning as a guide to choosing out of the half-dozen characters that sound the same
or similar. If you looked up the same characters over a few times you would recognize it without much effort.
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