Pronunciation of pinyin "jiu"

[Alleluia]

Well this is what Wikipedia had to say about Finnish:

j /j/ voiced palatal semivowel

Ok, I believe you now. Maybe I'll just have to lay off the Little Miss Know-it-all thing...

Yeah I agree. It's just that one of the key accents westerners have of Chinese is pronouncing voiceless initials as voiced. Hence, more awareness should be taken when pronouncing them. And certainly pinyin's using conventional Western voiced consonants for voiceless consonants doesn't help matters, especially with all the misinformation about how bi sounds like beat. The problem is also in people misinforming others that the j in pinyin ISN'T like German j, but like the English j, when it is neither. Everyone pays special attention to pinyin q, x, zh, sh, ch, z, c, r... but the b,d,g,j get ignored even though they are also very different from English usages.

You have a point there. And anyway, most of us learn English before Chinese anyway, so the danger of misinformation is probably always there...

Maybe the problem with pinyin is that it simplifies too much. Thats a good thing, too, as it makes the writing easier, but it may create difficulties. If it used more combinations of letters instead of single letters to designate the different consonant phonemes, maybe there wouldn't be so many confusions. But then, English too uses ch, sh and so on. Should we just start using IPA...