Help Figuring Out What This Word Is

[tony1343]

Hi,

I was talking to a Chinese person the other day; attempting to improve my very limited Putonghua skills.

Anyway, she was telling me that her job involves working for foreign companies and finding the cheapest factory for their product to be made in. I asked her what her title was at work. I'm not sure if she understood, but she said something that sounded like yiewuyuan (ee-uh-woo-you-en). I've tried using a dictionary to find this word. Obviously, my spelling is not correct. I easily could have heard wrong too, so you might not be able to figure this out.

Any help would be appreciated though. Thanks.

[Quest]

业务员

[tony1343]

Thanks!

[self-taught-mba]

What quest said.

Your spelling was not a valid pinyin combination.

attempting to improve my very limited Putonghua skills

So let me try to help a little. Please don't take this the wrong way. Honestly, you need to improve upon your pinyin foundation. People with a strong foundation would realize right away that y cannot be followed by an ie combination. This will save you a lot of headache in the future as you would be able to instantly realize what is not a valid pinyin spelling. That way you'll be able to look up words you encounter much easier.

Give a man a fish . . . teach him how to fish . . .

So let's look at the root cause together.

Look at the pinyin chart here:

look down and left in the column labeled "none" . Do you see where the "ye" has taken the place of "ie"?

You can think of it this way:

y as a initial acts as a proxy "i" or a placeholder, so yie would be redundant and therefore not valid.

(let's not let this become like the ch/zh vs. q/j thread - talking in laymen's terms here people:mrgreen:)

Hope that helps your understanding somewhat. Dig into that chart and really understand it, and it will solve the systemic problem that is currently impeding your learning.

Best of luck,

[tony1343]

Don't worry about hurting my feelings. I never take offense to constructive criticism (actually its difficult to offend me at all).

Thanks a lot for the link. I'm definitely checking this out when I have time later. It definitely seems worth learning, since there are so many combinations that in theory could be used but aren't.

I was trying to approximate what I thought I heard. But obviously that isn't what I heard, since that sound wouldn't exist in Mandarin.

Any help is appreciated. I'm definitely a beginner and will be for a long while, since I am in a non-Chinese environment most of the time and have usually only an hour a day to study (except weekends). Thanks.

[Prase]

People with a strong foundation would realize right away that y cannot be followed by an ie combination.

Really? yi+e - yie ; yi+e+wu+yuan - yiewuyuan

Knowing pinyin is not enough to recognize it's wrong.

[Lu]

You can't write 'yiewuyuan' in correct pinyin, it has to be yi'ewuyuan. There needs to be an apostroph between a word that starts with a vowel and the word before it.