Need help on Chinese romanization...

[CDNBaller]

Which Chinese romanization is better???

Pīnyīn or Wade-Giles???

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BTW, can anyone translate this to English?

yo ni dang wo de AF nen peng yo shr wo de fu chi. ni fe chang ke ai! wen en!

[back]

没听说过Wade-Giles，不知道是什么。

要学好中文，拼音非常重要。

i dont know what "Wade-Giles"is ,never heard of it.

but i am pretty sure : if you want to learn chinese well. pinyin is very very important.

[CDNBaller]

back,

Wade-Giles:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade-Giles

I just started learning Pin Yin..

[back]

是这个东西吗：

韦杰氏罗马拼音(Wade-Giles System of Romanization)

我的确是第一次听说，可能台湾朋友用这个吧，似乎大陆（mainland）只用拼音啊，估计拼音是应该是基本的和必须学的东西吧。

用拼音输入汉字也非常快和方便，我推荐“拼音加加”和“紫光拼音”两个软件，汉字录入很快。如你只需要输入“zhg”（即zhong guo的缩写），就可以输出“中国”了，也很方便。

时间和水平关系，我就暂时不写英文了。

万事开头难，祝你的中文学习之旅一切顺利。

[back]

is it the so-called "Wade-Giles System of Romanization"?

wow, it is just the first time that i heard about it. i am totally confused over it.maybe,,,i think...taiwan or hongkong friends use it. we mainland dont use it. but ..as i said ,ping yin is essential to learning the language.

and you know, we could use ping yin to put "han zi " into computer , actually, it is very fast. using some convenient and useful software, like "拼音加加 ping yin jiajia"“紫光拼音 zi guang ping yin”，you could find them in google，and download them。

but i am afraid you need chinese OS。。。maybe。。。

okay，if you have any more chinese questions，just let me know，i will be there。

actually i do learn a lot in the forum these days，especially spoken english。

thanks，roddy and other good friends。

[skylee]

yo ni dang wo de AF nen peng yo shr wo de fu chi. ni fe chang ke ai! wen en!

I guess in Chinese it is (in the brackets are hanyu pinyin) -

有(you) 你當我的AF男(nan) 朋友(you) 是(shi) 我的福氣, 你非(fei)常可愛! (!!!) 晚(wan) 安 (an)!

In English it would be - "I am lucky to have you as my AF boyfriend. You are very adorable! Good night!"

I hope I am not very wrong ...

[Altair]

From a U.S. point of view, there is absolutely no question that Pinyin is now more useful than Wade-Giles. Knowledge of Wade-Giles is, however, necessary if you want to read any historical works about China that are written in English.

Wade-Giles seems to have been divised with more of a linguistic orientation than Pinyin. Pinyin seems to have been created with more practical needs in mind. Wade-Giles was invented by foreigners to represent the sounds they heard, with no particular focus on Beijing Mandarin. Pinyin was invented with an eye to establishing a national script to replace characters altogether and to represent a unified standard.

An example of the difference between the two systems is that Wade-Giles uses values for consonants that are more in line with the norms of Romance language and international phonetic rules.

If you speak French, Spanish, or Portuguese (maybe also Italian and Greek and the Slavic languages), you can get away with thinking of the first sound in 道 dao4 as a "t." On the other hand, spelling the first sound in 套 tao4 as "t'" and the whole word as "t'ao" allows the strange use of the apostrophe to draw attention to the fact that one has to do something unusual to pronounce the Chinese aspiration that follows the "t" sound.

If you speak English (or maybe any of the Germanic languages), the Chinese "d" of 道 dao4 sounds like the voiced unaspirated "d" of "down." The "t" of 套 tao4 just sounds like a slightly exaggerated version of the "t" in "town." Pinyin spelling makes much more sense from this perspective. In fact, most of the American speakers of Chinese that I know seem simply to use the English sounds for the Chinese sounds without realizing the differences between them.

Wade-Giles also seems to pay more attention to vowel alternations (allophones), which makes the system look more complex. Pinyin hides the complexity behind a surface regularity, leaving native speakers to pronounce vowels like "i" and "e" in whatever way is required by the surrounding environment (e.g., qi vs. chi and le vs. lei).

[CDNBaller]

Thanks back, skylee and Altair for your input!

I appreciate it

[shandongcn]

yo ni dang wo de AF nen peng yo shr wo de fu chi. ni fe chang ke ai! wen en!

The correct Pinyin is ,

you2 ni3 dang1 wo3 de nan2 peng2 you3,shi4 wo3 de fu2 qi4. ni3 fei1 chang2 ke3 ai4! wen2 ni3!

有你当我的男朋友，是我的福气．你非常可爱．吻你！

who is the lucky guy!