Is there any alternative to English pinyin to learn how to pronunce Chinese words?

[Iriya]

Personally, I think the Chinese language is based around the Chinese characters and not the other way around (once the characters were invented they immediately started dominating the evolution of the language). E.g. when two people are talking and one doesn't understand what's being said (this is very common even between the native speakers) the other would try to explain what specific character they're talking about, either by saying a common compound word that has this character (x from xy, e.g. 感情的感), its radical (e.g. 木字旁的杯) or the elements it's composed of (e.g. 杰：一个木和四点水) or even drawing it in the air. So basically the goal of the spoken Chinese language is to communicate what specific Chinese characters the speaker has in mind. It's a logographic language, not a phonetic one.

Pinyin is of course not a full script for Mandarin. It's just the pronunciation.

[skylee]

It is most definitely not "only a way of showing you the pronunciation of the character."

What else is it?

[roddy]

It's just the pronunciation.

So is speaking.

What else is it?

His answer's in his previous sentence.

Good luck with this one, Taibei. I fear you swim against strong currents.

[Guest realmayo]

I think people get too hung up on the fact that it's "natural" for a spoken language to have a written part, when actually it's not natural at all -- only a minority of languages can be written. More people have spoken Chinese fluently without being able to write it, than have been able to do both (I guess).

Personally, I think the Chinese language is based around the Chinese characters and not the other way around (once the characters were invented they immediately started dominating the evolution of the language).

Chinese characters: 3000 years old (ish)

Widespread literacy in China: since when?

[renzhe]

So basically the goal of the spoken Chinese language is to communicate what specific Chinese characters the speaker has in mind. It's a logographic language, not a phonetic one.

There is no such thing. All languages are spoken and all writing is developed to communicate the spoken language. While I'm not a linguist, all linguists I know are very adamant about this.

I am not referring to sign languages here, only about writing systems for spoken languages. Which are all phonetic scripts capturing spoken information. This is true even for Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Chinese script, though both retained some pictographic elements.

It is true that Chinese has a very interesting relation to the characters, and that the latter have influenced the spoken language in interesting ways. But spoken Mandarin is spoken Mandarin, and characters are a way to write it down (and all other Chinese dialects).

Pinyin is of course not a full script for Mandarin.

Of course it is. It fully and completely captures all aspects of spoken Mandarin, and is therefore a full script. You can go from spoken Mandarin to pinyin and back with no loss of information, to the extent that it works in any other language.

What else is it?

It is a complete writing system, and an alternative way to write Chinese, much like German and English can be (and are) written phonetically.

You are right that nowadays, it is primarily used only to note the pronunciation, but it is more than that.

[Guest realmayo]

It's a bit hard to agree with that. Because people write in a different way to how they speak. So: in one respect it's not actually relevant that pinyin "captures all aspects of spoken Mandarin". If it is slower to read and open to more ambiguities than characters, then it is inferior to characters.

I can agree that "all writing is developed to communicate the spoken language", if the emphasis is on developed because it seems that after the written language has been developed, it takes on characteristics of its own.

Edit: also, and I don't think this is unnecessarily pedantic: a written language can't capture all aspects of a spoken language, for instance tone (not "tones") -- else italics and later smilies wouldn't have been invented!

[renzhe]

If it is slower to read and open to more ambiguities than characters, then it is inferior than characters.

It is open to exactly the same ambiguities as spoken Mandarin, which makes it a complete and full script for Mandarin.

Just for the record: I very much like Chinese characters and have no intention of reading books written purely in pinyin. But there is nothing stopping such books from being published. The Vietnamese converted completely to an alphabet, and Koreans have switched over to a phonetic script too. An accurate phonetic representation of a language is automatically a written script of that language. Whether it is used is a different question.

[Iriya]

Here's a small test. Log on to QQ and try chatting with someone on a somewhat advanced topic like economics or politics in full pinyin. See how many times you have to guess what's being said.

There's a reason why the Chinese language is still using the characters and they're not going to be abandoned any time soon. A phonetic script is not sufficient for Chinese.

[Guest realmayo]

It is open to exactly the same ambiguities as spoken Mandarin, which makes it a complete and full script for Mandarin.

But that's irrelevant. You're implying that a written language is simply a mapping of the spoken onto the page. But it clearly isn't. It might be a "script" for spoken Mandarin, but that doesn't make it a good writing system.

[roddy]

Here's a small test. Log on to QQ and try chatting with someone on a somewhat advanced topic like economics or politics in full pinyin. See how many times you have to guess what's being said.

How about you do that, and then come and report back.

I'm amused that this discussion has come up again. I thought we'd put this all aside in 2005 or something.

[Guest realmayo]

It must meat a knead.

[renzhe]

You're implying that a written language is simply a mapping of the spoken onto the page.

Actually, I make a distinction between spoken Mandarin and written Chinese. I just claim that spoken Chinese gave rise to written Chinese, not the other way around. If Chinese characters dominated the development of spoken Chinese, everybody would be speaking Classical Chinese, including vocabulary and syntax.

In fact, the overwhelming number of characters which were invented over the years to represent new words which arose in spoken dialects proves the opposite, IMHO.

It might be a "script" for spoken Mandarin, but that doesn't make it a good writing system.

It makes it as good as 99.9% of all writing systems ever used by humans, and that's good enough for me.

Granted, characters offer some additional possibilities, leading to more concise writing in some cases, which does not always transfer well to spoken language. But that doesn't make pinyin any less complete as a writing system.

It is just important to note that Pinyin is used to transcribe spoken Mandarin, not to write out formal Chinese originally written in characters. It is 100% as understandable as spoken Mandarin.

Log on to QQ and try chatting with someone on a somewhat advanced topic like economics or politics in full pinyin. See how many times you have to guess what's being said.

Exactly as many as I would if we voice-chatted. I just need to read it outloud, because it is a complete, 100% accurate transcription of what is said.

A phonetic script is not sufficient for Chinese.

Chinese characters are a phono-semantic script, unique among today's scripts. But a large amount of the information they carry -- the majority, in fact -- is phonetic.

DeFrancis argues (and I agree) that a non-phonetic script cannot possibly exist, even in theory. Any such language would not be able to fully capture a spoken language. That's why all pictographic scripts (including hieroglyphs and Hanzi) eventually start using phonetic information, marking a transition from symbols to written language.

[Guest realmayo]

Well, we have a difference of opinion. I see differences in how people speak and how they write. I also think that written words fail to convey tone and other information if they are just written down 'verbatim' (!). This is why I don't think written English = spoken English. If you disagree on this fundamental aspect and can't see a written language as being anything other than an "accurate phonetic representation of a language" then there's no point discussing it futher.

Edit: BTW, written Vietnamese is not an accurate phonetic representation of spoken Vietnamese.

[renzhe]

Well, we have a difference of opinion. I see differences in how people speak and how they write.

But this is hardly unique to pinyin. It applies to every script and every language. As long as you write down what is understandable in spoken language, it's perfect. If you write things that people will not understand when spoken outloud, then it doesn't work. But it's not supposed to.

I'm just arguing that pinyin is a complete script for writing down standard Mandarin. Zhuyin Fuhao is, too, as is (correct, non-bastardised) Wade-Giles. If you can accurately represent phonemes of a language, you can represent language.

It will be awkward if you're not used to it, that's true. But any written script is awkward when you're just starting.

[Guest realmayo]

Well, as a reporter I see every day just how massive the difference is between how people speak when explaining something, and how they write it -- and indeed how spoken words need to be changed before they can be quoted and printed. In speech, people constantly repeat and reinforce, actively making sure that they are being understood. Plus the emphases and rhythms of speech provide important pointers to a listener: it's possible to read a transcript of a conversation and be temporarily confused where that confusion would never arise if you were listening to, not reading, those same words.

This indicates that a written language seeks to do things that aren't normally done in the spoken language.

Which means that simply writing sound-representations of how a language is spoken is not enough for a written language to function well.

I'm not arguing here a defence of Chinese characters versus pinyin. Just arguing against the assumption that (a) all a written system needs to do is reproduce the spoken language, and (b) a written language is a natural consequence of having a spoken language.

After all, lots of languages (Korean, English, Chinese etc) have words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently. Don't you think this could be to aid comprehension?

[renzhe]

I don't disagree with that. When I say "100% accurate representation", I mean phonemically accurate. Of course there are aspects of spoken language which are not written.

I just argue that pinyin is as good for writing down spoken Mandarin as Roman alphabet is for writing down German or Spanish.

The fact that a somewhat parallel development of written Chinese (with lots of influence from Classical Chinese, which might have never been spoken) has led to a written Chinese which is ambiguous when read outloud, that's a different issue, quite specific to Chinese.

[Guest realmayo]

I see what you mean about accurate. And I certainly don't disagree with:

pinyin is as good for writing down spoken Mandarin as Roman alphabet is for writing down German or Spanish.

I guess I just wanted to put forward the point that any reasonably sophisticated written language is going to want to do more than just write down the spoken language, and it's possible to imagine better and worse writing systems for achieving this. The question of whether Chinese, with a high proportion of same-sounding words, is less suited to a simple system like pinyin is probably, as Roddy points out, something that has been discussed already.

[jkhsu]

It must meat a knead.

I really like this quote and I think it sort of explains the issues with using pinyin in a reading / writing scenario. While renzhe's correct that pinyin is phonemically accurate, using pinyin in a reading / writing scenario is not the same as reading and writing in proper English for example. Would it be similar to reading / writing English using IPA?

So the quotes "it must meet a need" and "it must meat a knead" both equal "ɪt məst mit ə nid" (I am not sure if I have this right as I used an IPA translator online).

In theory, listening to mandarin Chinese should be the same as reading the pinyin equivalent. However I am wondering if the difficulty in reading pinyin vs listening comes from the fact that most people are not used to reading pinyin, similar to how most English speakers don't read English written in IPA (assuming they even know it)? Does the sound itself when spoken in context give a more directly translation of the meaning?

[imron]

However I am wondering if the difficulty in reading pinyin vs listening comes from the fact that most people are not used to reading pinyin,

Almost certainly yes. If you can have a phone conversation with someone and understand everything, you should have no difficulty understanding that same conversation written as correct pinyin (i.e. properly spaced and toned, ra ther than one syl la ble per word). The limiting factor is practice with reading it.

Here's a small test. Log on to QQ and try chatting with someone on a somewhat advanced topic like economics or politics in full pinyin.

Take away people's Chinese IMEs and the ability to display Chinese fonts, and this is what happens. Several years back, before Chinese language support was well-supported by computers, I knew a number of Chinese people who basically communicated with their family back home entirely in pinyin (for written stuff, obviously they communicated over the phone from time-to-time also) because there was no other practical way for them to do so.

[Shelley]

Wow, I don't suppose the OP realalized what a can of worms he/she was opening, nor did I:)

I think i would like to say that for all the pros and cons of pinyin it has to said that it is very useful in many ways.

I would also like to clarify earlier comments i made about not learning pinyin before chinese. What I meant was don't learn pinyin only, except at the very begining. Learn characters and pinyin together as soon as you feel confident with the pinyin.

Shelley