Pinyin vs. Zhuyin?

[LucyxLucy]

Hi all!

I'm pretty fluent in Chinese, and I know the pinyin system really well. I just started learning Zhuyin Fuhao a few days ago, I was wondering if there's anyone who is familiar with both systems that could tell me a bit about the pro's and con's of zhuyin fuhao, in terms of difficulty to learn, usefullness - in general and typing wise, and ultimately, if it would be worthwhile to learn?

[Hofmann]

Learning difficulty:

If one is familiar with Latin characters, Pinyin should be easier.

If not, whatever.

Usefulness:

Pinyin is more widespread. There are more things meant to be used with Pinyin than Zhuyin, such as IME's. More resources and reference books use Pinyin.

Typing:

Zhuyin is more efficient. Shuangpin, however, is more efficient than Zhuyin.

Logicality:

Because Pinyin is written with Latin characters, those who are used to using a language that uses Latin characters may be influenced by how the Latin characters are pronounced in these languages. Because Zhuyin doesn't resemble anything but Chinese, it doesn't hint that anything should be pronounced any certain way as it is in any other language.

Zhuyin represents the phonemic organization of initials, finals, and tones more neatly than Pinyin.

[Chief123]

I use both. A couple arguments both ways:

Pinyin is easier for me to read out loud like when teaching a class. It's also more natural if you use an latin alphabet with your mother tongue.

Zhuyin doesn't rely on someone's idea of the proper English representation of a sound. For example x in Pinyin is totally different than x in English. Z in Pinyin is totally different than the z in English. Zhuyin doesn't have that problem because there's no "translation" back to English which may be confusing. Hope that makes sense.

Zhuyin is side by side with characters and so I think it's easier to be able to recognize characters with a corresponding sound and this just really isn't possible with Pinyin. You can't help but kind of look at both - the character and the Zhuyin at the same time.

I use a font that includes the Zhuyin symbols so any Chinese page on the Internet comes up with characters and Zhuyin side-by-side which is more natural to me than copying and pasting text from a news article into a dictionary to get the Pinyin.

Both have their place for me especially since I live in Taiwan. I really like Zhuyin. People in other places may not have the same opinion just because they aren't exposed to it but there's no reason it couldn't be used on the mainland or elsewhere with simplified characters.

Mark

[TaiwanNutt]

I've needed a font that includes the Zhuyin symbols for a long time. Where/How can I get it?

Thanks,

Russ

[sujisol]

Zhuyin and Pinyin both use phonetic systems. There is another called ShuangPin that is worth checking out. Also the younger people on Taiwan use a simplified version that notates only one key character for each of the 400 phonetic/tone combinations.

.....Zhuyin assumes fluent ability with BPMF and four tone notation. If you confuse tones or the phonetic set you can get lost trying to locate the right folio trace. Unlike Pinyin it will mainly access traditional Chinese characters. It's menu folios and numerical selection in characters like Ji and Shi take a lot of time to access. It has a full selection of bigrams but you must <shift/#> to select them. Ergonomically it is a challenge, because you need to use all 4 levels of the keyboard. You have always to stretch for tones,numbers,folio,and shift keys. I actually keep my fingers on the qwerty row and use my thumbs to tap the zxcvbnm row and space key. As I said my friends use the simplified version, but it assumes you know which of the 400 phonetic combinations represent which character. In other words you must be well set in the Taiwan Traditional Mandarin venacular in order to follow the input/output.

[Chief123]

I've needed a font that includes the Zhuyin symbols for a long time. Where/How can I get it?

You can get them from here.

One thing that it took me awhile to understand is that there are different fonts for different tones for different characters. For a long time I thought the fonts were wrong until I understood this.

For example HanWangKaiMediumChuIn has 的 as de (neutral tone) and HanWangKaiMediumPoIn1 has the same character as di4. If you notice a character's tone is wrong in the context you are using it in, you have to change to another font just for that character.

HanWangKaiMediumChuIn and HanWangMingMediumChuIn are the two main fonts with the most common tones for the characters and then each font has 3 or 4 variant fonts with different tones. Note that the variant fonts only include characters that have different tones - not all the characters.

Mark

[anonymoose]

For the purposes of character input on the computer, there are many pieces of software that allow very efficient input with abbreviated pinyin, for example entering just the first letter for each character. I can type out 葡萄酒 just by entering ptj.

[Chief123]

What software allows you to do the abbreviated Pinyin input?

Mark

[imron]

Both sogou and google's pinyin input methods allow it I believe. A google search will turn up download links for either of them.

[進一步，退一步]

a little befuddled by sujisol's post ... zhuyin and pinyin are just different representations of the same sounds. both keyboard layouts access characters the same way (drop down menus based on phonetic input), and both have interpretive algorithms which will try to guess what you are typing, and then choose the character that is most common in a given use. i use zhuyin, and actually i only ever use "shift" to type english characters. zhuyin keyboards can be difficult (if not impossible) to find outside of taiwan, but an easy solution is to just write the symbol on each key yourself. you can also find stickers that have the phonetic symbols made for keyboards if you don't like the idea of writing on your keyboard. personally i don't find typing troublesome at all, and especially when it comes to something like cellphone text messaging -- just fewer keys to input per character.

as far as learning ... if you have already learned pinyin and your chinese is already good, then why bother learning another phonetic system at all? really the phonetics are only useful for learning pronunciation, or looking up something in a dictionary ... once you have learned the pronunciation you're kinda done with that part, right? as for me, i learned zhuyin first, and i'm glad i did. as another poster mentioned, because it has no correlation to the roman alphabet, it was easier for me to associate new and unique sounds to the zhuyin notation. even if i know that a pinyin "c" doesn't sound like an english "c," my mind will still trip me up if i have to read it, whereas i have no baggage attached to ㄘ. i do also think that, in general, the learning materials with zhuyin ruby text are better because you are already reading the chinese character ... most learning materials i've seen that use pinyin, ONLY use pinyin, and introduce the character at a later time. that said, of course it really just comes down to a combination of what you are comfortable with, where in the world you are learning chinese (most places use pinyin i think), and who is teaching you. there is also no doubt that romanization is useful for translation of proper names, etc ...