How useful is zhuyin / 'bopomofo'? How to use it?

[renzhe]

This might be true for children learning through immersion, but I'd still wager a guess that it's different for Europeans who are learning Mandarin as adults. I think all of them learn a phonetic transliteration method of some kind.

Besides, both zhuyin and pinyin were created to teach children Mandarin pronunciation.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Dear all,

Renzhe wrote:

This is OK if you carry your own keyboard around, but good luck finding a keyboard with zhuyin on it in a public library in Spain, or your workplace in France. That's what I meant.

Most people can't touch-type, and I'd expect that the number of people touch-typing zhuyin is quite low.

You know, any Windows computer with traditional Chinese input installed is capable of typing Zhuyin Fuhao.

It really doesn't matter if your keyboard has little Zhuyin Fuhao markings on it or not.

If you know Zhuyin Fuhao, you just type based on where the marks are supposed to be.

And if you don't know the layout of a typical Zhuyin Fuhao keyboard you could always pull up the little virtual keyboard.

For instance, I don't know Zhuyin Fuhao but looking at the virtual keyboard I know to type "w", "j", & "i" to get the Zhuyin Fuhao equivalent of the Hanyu Pinyin "TUO".

And then I'm given a list of characters with the pronunciation to choose from. Then I just type the number for the character I want. Such as 1 for "strip", 2 for "haul, tow", etc.

When I learned touch typing in junior high school in the states the teacher even used fingernail polish to cover over the keys so we wouldn't be tempted to look at the keyboard.

I'm sure learning the Zhuyin Fuhao keyboard layout wouldn't take very long for someone familiar with the Zhuyin Fuhao system. Practically every kid and adult on Taiwan?

Don't know about Hong Kong. ;)

Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.

[Shi Tong]

- far more people are familiar with pinyin than zhuyin. I've never met a person who knew zhuyin, and outside Taiwan, this is bound to be a rarity.

Which is fine, but it's because of the "size" of pinyin. Which is fine, and a good explaination. However, it doesn't mean it's a better system by the fact that it's larger.

- pinyin is far more widespread than zhuyin. Count the number of websites using pinyin and zhuyin. Count the number of learning materials. Number of dictionaries

Which is fine, but it's because of the "size" of pinyin. Which is fine, and a good explaination. However, it doesn't mean it's a better system by the fact that it's larger.

I am currently learning pinyin and simplfied characters. Not because I think they're better, but because they're bigger, and it will be more useful if I want to use it for practical uses.

- pinyin is the standard used by most international bodies to romanise Chinese, including the UN

It's because of the "size" of pinyin. Which is fine, and a good explaination. I agree that romanization using a standard way is also a good idea, but it doesn't help the reader if they dont have any clue to start with.

The short story is -- you MUST know pinyin. You can and should use zhuyin if you prefer it, but you don't have to know zhuyin.

I didn't say you shouldn't learn pinyin, and I agree that knowing pinyin is very useful.

I also didn't say you have to know zhuyin, I'm just talking about it's uses and how good it is.

Sure, you can use bopomofo/zhuyin to transcribe Chinese, and learn a bopomofo keyboard layout for typing, and use a bastardised, improvised Wade-Giles for transcribing names, and use Tongyong pinyin for city names, and use four-corner lookup for dictionaries, and you'd have all the bases covered. And you would STILL have to learn pinyin because that's what the rest of the world uses.

Which is again, because of it's size. And I agree, this is a good reason to learn it.

I fail to see how any of these arguments are related to how zhuyin is useful or how to use zhuyin, I also fail to see why it makes zhuyin less useful to a chinese learner?

Just because you and a lot of other people can learn Chinese using pinyin, doesn't mean that another lot of people might find zhuyin useful.

[renzhe]

That's the whole point -- nobody is arguing that zhuyin is a bad system. Surely there are pros and cons for both zhuyin and pinyin, and any other method when it comes to how good they are at capturing spoken sounds.

We are arguing that pinyin is important due to a number of considerations, not all of which relate to how good it is as a phonetic system. Things like widespread adoption are also very important factors when it comes to determining whether to learn a transcription system or not and how useful it is.

[Shi Tong]

That's the whole point -- nobody is arguing that zhuyin is a bad system

Well, there is a fair amount of "there's no point in learning zhuyin"/ "Pinyin is a better system", therefore, I feel like people think that zhuyin isn't as good as pinyin.

Surely there are pros and cons for both zhuyin and pinyin

Indeed, and my original post which suggested that some people might find a C in pinyin for a ts sound in zhuyin is confusing was dismissed as a bit of a joke. IMO, if someone is struggling with pinyin (and I'm sure there are people who do), maybe an alternative might be a good option to explore, and my point was that zhuyin was a good alternative, since, not only does it instantly tell the reader "this is not the same as English", it also tells the reader that there are no chinese words with more than 3 noises. Something which pinyin fails to do when you have long words like zhuang.

This doesn't mean it's a fundamentally better method, but, as you have already acknowledged, it has a lot of pros which some people might find very useful.

You also have to remember that if I had continued my original studies in Taiwan, I would have learned almost soley with zhuyin, and I would be able to be just as capable.

We are arguing that pinyin is important due to a number of considerations, not all of which relate to how good it is as a phonetic system.

I agree, and it's not just a phonetic system, which makes it useful, IMO, in 1 other way than zhuyin, and that is that complete outsiders can get a general idea of how you might say something.

Renzhe, I would like to ask you a simple question.

If I told you my name was James, how would you pronounce it?

[Lu]

I feel like people think that zhuyin isn't as good as pinyin.

'Not as good as' and 'not necessary' is not the same as 'bad'. Surely you know that.

At what point do you even disagree with what others here are saying? You say zhuyin is a valid system that can be useful to Chinese learners, yes, of course it is, is anyone disagreeing with that?

[chrix]

Shi Tong,

I like zhuyin, but I still find pinyin more useful and practical. I studied in Taiwan 10 years ago as well, and already back then teaching in hanyu pinyin was standard practice for national universities when teaching foreigners Mandarin.

I don't recall how long it took me to learn it, in a way I rather learnt the keyboard positions rather than the actual symbols, out of sheer necessity. I would remember that 5 is ㄓ, u is 一 and 8 is ㄚ, and everything else would follow from there...

skylee,

how would you learn characters without any indicator of pronunciation? Even before zhuyin and pinyin were invented, people made use of methods like 反切. I would doubt that highly for native speakers of Chinese that they studied all the characters in school without any method indicating pronunciation.

[gato]

my point was that zhuyin was a good alternative, since, not only does it instantly tell the reader "this is not the same as English"

Would you have the same problem learning French or German, i.e., all those English letters make you want to pronounce French / German words like English? Would it be easier to learn French / German if they used a different alphabet?

[renzhe]

If I told you my name was James, how would you pronounce it?

I'm not sure I follow. I speak English, so I'd pronounce it the way English speakers pronounce it.

If I didn't speak English, I'd pronounce it as "Yaa-mes". And wonder why English people don't write phonetically, or at least invent a new alphabet which is less confusing

[skylee]

how would you learn characters without any indicator of pronunciation? Even before zhuyin and pinyin were invented, people made use of methods like 反切. I would doubt that highly for native speakers of Chinese that they studied all the characters in school without any method indicating pronunciation.

I don't understand your doubt. Consider a five-year old child, who knows like 30 to 40 characters. How can the child use methods like 反切? I used my memory. Wrote the characters again and again and tried to remember the pronunciations. I still remember making such huge mistakes as mistaking the character 季 in 一年四季 as 李 because I thought it was the same as my own surname and didn't see the difference of the two characters, and I did not know anything that can tell me that 季 is not the same as 李. I still remember how my parents laughed at me. 貴 and 桂 are homophones of 季 in Cantonese but back then I did not know these two characters either. So basically my only tool was my memory.

[Daan]

But surely as you learned more characters, you started using a romanisation system or a pronunciation-based method? Or did you learn all the characters, and not just the basic ones, by heart like that?

[renzhe]

But even if you can learn to read as a native speaker (therefore being familiar with the pronunciation already), surely you would need some sort of phonetic system to know how to pronounce new characters you run into while reading.

Like pinyin (or zhuyin) are used in dictionaries.

[skylee]

But surely as you learned more characters, you started using a romanisation system or a pronunciation-based method? Or did you learn all the characters, and not just the basic ones, by heart like that?

There was no such a tool. There was no pinyin back then (we are talking about decades ago in Hong Kong) and zhuyin was irrelevant because we learnt Chinese using Cantonese. And I had no idea of things like 反切. The only thing I could do was, I guess, when I was more advanced (secondary school) and learnt a more difficult character I would mark a simple homophone against it. Like when I learnt 魑魅 I might have marked 癡未 next to it to remind myself of the pronunciation.

[Daan]

That's impressive. Now that you mention it, I do recall seeing phonetic notes in dictionaries saying 音 X, where X was a character with the same pronunciation. I'd never realised this was because of the situation you describe, though.

[buzhongren]

What came first zhuyin the chicken or pinyin the egg. I find it interesting the sounds map directly to each other. I figure in the two systems there is a unmatched bopomofo symbol or pinyin initial or final. It wouldnt make sense there is any more Chinese sounds in one than the other but dialects might produce one like the Beijing er sound. I suspect zhuyin or pinyin were based on Wade-Giles sounds ie all three map to each other with nothing missing in the systems.

xiele,

Jim

[imron]

Hold on, I'm on the phone to ma ying jiu asking him........ He says it's not.

Perhaps you should ask someone other than Ma Yingjiu who is reasonably pro-pinyin. There is not-insignificant opposition to pinyin in some circles in Taiwan precisely because it is the official system used on the mainland and adopting is seen as akin to moving towards reunification. There have been numerous discussions about this on the forums (and in other places on the Internet) over the years. I can't find the links at the moment but it is an issue.

so why not either a) give it a try,

I did give it try many years ago. One thing zhuyin has over pinyin is that it emphasises that certain sounds are the same e.g. the -ui in 'dui' is the same sound as 'wei'. This is immediately obvious with zhuyin (ㄉㄨㄟ vs ㄨㄟ) but not so obvious with pinyin. This point however is not a problem if you learn pinyin properly and are aware which sounds are the same, but just spelt differently. On the whole though, after learning it, I found that zhuyin had little/no use to me because pinyin basically does everything zhuyin does and more (typing was never an issue for me, because I don't use pinyin for typing anyway, I use Wubi). So, although once upon a time I knew zhuyin reasonably well, I've now basically forgotten it because I never have a need to use it.

Sorry, where did I say that I thought all romanisation schemes are equally good

You're right, what I meant to say was 'transcription schemes' rather than 'romanisation schemes' because I meant to include zhuyin in that. What I was specifically referring to was comments made by you such as this one:

IMO, there is no "better system", just different ones,

. Like I said, it depends on your definition of better and for whom, and how much weight you give the various pros/cons of each system. For me, it is overwhelmingly in pinyin's favour.

it also tells the reader that there are no chinese words with more than 3 noises. Something which pinyin fails to do when you have long words like zhuang.

That's just an indication of not learning pinyin properly. Pinyin is always made up of either two sounds - an initial and a final, or just a final (the middle sounds you find in zhuyin are basically included as part of the final). This corresponds to how Chinese people will breakdown the pronunciation of a syllable e.g. if you asked a Chinese person how to pronounce a syllable such as zhuang, they typically say the initial, then the final, then combine the two to pronounce the complete sound e.g. zh-, -uang, zhuang (see for example the discussion here). If someone is still looking at individual letters of a pinyin syllable rather than breaking it down into an initial and final, then they are not going about things in the correct manner.

[chrix]

There was no such a tool. There was no pinyin back then (we are talking about decades ago in Hong Kong) and zhuyin was irrelevant because we learnt Chinese using Cantonese. And I had no idea of things like 反切. The only thing I could do was, I guess, when I was more advanced (secondary school) and learnt a more difficult character I would mark a simple homophone against it. Like when I learnt 魑魅 I might have marked 癡未 next to it to remind myself of the pronunciation.

But you did learn the Cantonese pronunciation for every character, right? Presumably using some kind of pronunciation aid like jyutping perhaps?

Perhaps you should ask someone other than Ma Yingjiu who is reasonably pro-pinyin. There is not-insignificant opposition to pinyin in some circles in Taiwan precisely because it is the official system used on the mainland and adopting is seen as akin to moving towards reunification. There have been numerous discussions about this on the forums (and in other places on the Internet) over the years. I can't find the links at the moment but it is an issue.

Be careful to keep the two issues apart - what native speakers use in schools, and what romanisation scheme to use on road signs, which is mainly to the benefit of foreigners.

It is the latter where Ma Ying-jeou is in favour of hanyu pinyin over tongyong pinyin and bastardised Wade-Giles and what not (ironically enough, he keeps using a nonstandard romanisation of his own name despite of all that). I don't think abolishing zhuyin is on anyone's agenda right now.

Edited February 24, 2010 at 02:17 AM by chrix
one little "s" instead of a "d", changing the meaning greatly..

[skylee]

But you did learn the Cantonese pronunciation for every character, right? Presumably using some kind of pronunciation aid like jyutping perhaps?

No. There were no such tools (or I was not taught).

[Lu]

I suspect zhuyin or pinyin were based on Wade-Giles sounds ie all three map to each other with nothing missing in the systems.

I think the similarities of zhuyin, pinyin and Wade-Giles are mostly because all three are based on the same language, namely Mandarin Chinese. Research on initials and finals etc predates romanisation of the language by centuries.

[Shi Tong]

'Not as good as' and 'not necessary' is not the same as 'bad'. Surely you know that.

At what point do you even disagree with what others here are saying? You say zhuyin is a valid system that can be useful to Chinese learners, yes, of course it is, is anyone disagreeing with that?

Yes, but a lot of people are saying that zhuyin is not as good. It's been mentioned lots of times in this discussion with many various reasons given as to why.

I dont think anyone is disagreeing that zhuyin is a valid system that can be ysed, but I'm disagreeing that pinyin is a better system.

I don't recall how long it took me to learn it

Chrix, no problem. Did you or do you think it's very hard to learn though? Seems like people are unwilling to invest the time in, what I think, should take no longer than a week for complete beginners and a couple of days for people already versed.

Obviously, for those people happy with and using pinyin in a totally fluent way, it ISN'T necessary.

Would you have the same problem learning French or German, i.e., all those English letters make you want to pronounce French / German words like English? Would it be easier to learn French / German if they used a different alphabet?

Well, I kind of did, yes, and this is my point. I cant speak or learn German or French to any reasonable level, because my own head for what these sounds should sound like gets in the way. Is this a disadvantage for me? Yes. What system should I overcome this problem with? Zhuyin for Chinese is the answer.

I'm not sure I follow. I speak English, so I'd pronounce it the way English speakers pronounce it. If I didn't speak English, I'd pronounce it as "Yaa-mes". And wonder why English people don't write phonetically, or at least invent a new alphabet which is less confusing

:lol:Indeed!!

The reason I ask a simple one line question is because I want to follow on with this essential point.

How is the letter J useful to people learning English if they're, say, Swedish?

When an English child goes to school now (at the age of 5, as my son is), they learn phonetic sounds to all of the alphabet, including the original sounds for the normal alphabet.

It seems quite difficult at times for a 5 year old to distinguish between "I" (as in myself) and the sound "i" which comes in the middle of words like middle.

Sure this system beats the old one where they were forced to learn the alphabet as abcdefg with the "normal" way of pronouncing these, and then forced to learn that they change when used for spelling and reading, but IMO, this is why Romanisation systems suck in a lot of ways.

You cant create more than 26 sounds from the alphabet without adding letters together- zi and zhi. It's just annoying.

What came first zhuyin the chicken or pinyin the egg.

Interesting idea, but what matters to me is that people are given an effective and useful tool to learn Chinese with, and if they find one system hard, they should be offered another.

Perhaps you should ask someone other than Ma Yingjiu who is reasonably pro-pinyin. There is not-insignificant opposition to pinyin in some circles in Taiwan precisely because it is the official system used on the mainland and adopting is seen as akin to moving towards reunification. There have been numerous discussions about this on the forums (and in other places on the Internet) over the years. I can't find the links at the moment but it is an issue.

My point is that politics should not get in the way of a good decision or a useful idea.

One thing zhuyin has over pinyin is that it emphasises that certain sounds are the same e.g. the -ui in 'dui' is the same sound as 'wei'. This is immediately obvious with zhuyin (ㄉㄨㄟ vs ㄨㄟ) but not so obvious with pinyin.

Precisely why I think pinyin is confusing.

Good for you that you dont find it confusing, and good for those other people also, but bad for those who need something else as a guideline, like zhuyin.

You're right, what I meant to say was 'transcription schemes' rather than 'romanisation schemes' because I meant to include zhuyin in that. What I was specifically referring to was comments made by you such as this one:

Yeah, but you're taking my comment perposefully out of context. I was saying that there is no better system between pinyin and zhuyin, because I think that for the right learner, they're the correct tool, and using this tool they can learn Mandarin.

I'm not saying that all romanisation systems are equally good or bad, and if I said something to that effect, then I didn't mean it that way.

Clearly there are Romanisation systems that work very well, but IMO, nearly all of them contain very annoying flaws.

That's just an indication of not learning pinyin properly. Pinyin is always made up of either two sounds - an initial and a final, or just a final (the middle sounds you find in zhuyin are basically included as part of the final). This corresponds to how Chinese people will breakdown the pronunciation of a syllable e.g. if you asked a Chinese person how to pronounce a syllable such as zhuang, they typically say the initial, then the final, then combine the two to pronounce the complete sound e.g. zh-, -uang, zhuang (see for example the discussion here). If someone is still looking at individual letters of a pinyin syllable rather than breaking it down into an initial and final, then they are not going about things in the correct manner.

I know this, and it's exactly the same way as they pronounce Zhuyin when they're explaining how to pronounce a word. One problem with your example overhead is that there is a sticking together of the middle sound with the final, which you dont get in zhuyin. TBH, I think you might also be wrong here- zhi wu ang is three sounds, like in zhuyin, and should be explained in such a way. Also, what's confusing if this is written down is that you have to add a w where there is no such sound- zhi wang isn't "zhi-wung", it's much easier to understand in zhuyin as zhi and oo and ang.

Also, this is just as much to do with the spelling of the word as the pronunciation.