Chinese in purely phonetic script

[fenlan]

Shibo, you have not addressed any of the objections raised by people in this thread. You just restated your original view. But what about dealing with the counterarguments?

[nipponman]

Originally posted by: Gato

n-man, I think I got it, though I admit I had to read it slowly until I understood the context. Shouldn't ha4 of "zai4 ha4 yu3 zhong1" be han4 instead? And the chi2 in "he2 cheng2 chi2, chi2 he2 chi2 zu3" should be ci2?

You got it right. I didn't intend to put those extra "test" words in there either!

Originally posted by: Shibo

but as soon as I got the context, the rest came easily. If this were spoken you would have no trouble understanding it, I explained this in my previous posts， so please stop post random Hanyu Pinyin passages. My first Hanyu Pinyin post was to explain it being difficult and awkward because of not being associated to Hanyu Pinyin from childhood...

Sorry shibo, but this wasn't random. I wanted to see if people could read a text in pinyin with as much ease as with hanzi. I got mixed results. everybody here would have probably ran circles around this passage if it had hanzi in it.

nipponman

[atitarev]

I wouldn't make any conclusions, Nipponman. Everyone's got what they wanted to hear but to really find out, IMHO a research would be needed with Chinese Mandarin speakers.

In Vietnam, whose language hasn't changed after the introduction of phonetic script apart from the way foreign names are transliterated, the script was created by a foreigner and the population was illeterate, so it was easier to teach people an easy script than Chinese characters. Vietnamese has also a huge large number of homophones, now homonyms.

Because the period of education necessary to gain initial literacy is considerably less for the largely phonetic Latin-based script compared to the several years necessary to master the full range of Chinese characters, the adoption of the Vietnamese alphabet also facilitated widespread literacy among Vietnamese speakers—in fact, whereas a majority of Vietnamese in Vietnam could not read or write prior to the 20th century, the population is now almost universally literate.

Romanized examples should be tested on Chinese people, not on learners. Pinyin generated from NJStar is far from perfect - main problem is with segmentation and that the words are not joined, no need to separate "Riben" into ri and ben.

I found similar discussions rage all over Chinese language forums

[fenlan]

Nipponman, I think your pinyin string would be easier to understand 1) grouped into words; and 2) with tone marks, rather than tone numbers; and 3) with correct use of the neutral tone.This is my rendering:

Duǎnyǔ zài hànyǔ zhong jùyǒu fēicháng zhòngyào de dìwèi. Hànyǔ de yǔyán dānwèi fēnwéi wǔjí, suīshuō yǔsù 、yǔsùzǔ hécheng cí, cí hé cízǔ hécheng duǎnyǔ, cí huò duǎnyǔ zǔchéng jùzi. Shíjìshang, hěnshǎo yǒu dānge cí gòuchéng de jùzi.

I didn't fully understand yǔsù 、yǔsùzǔ, does this mean "morphemes and groups of morphemes"? The point about getting the neutral tone right is that once a block of text is pinyinized, relying on just pronunciation, then the tonal values all matter. hécheng is easier to understand than héchéng, because it corresponds to the pronunciation better. Similarly, fēnwéi rather than fēnwèi.

Let me add that a sentence like this is nothing like a sentence with lots of rare characters in it. The point still stands that only simple Chinese can be adequately pinyinized.

[fenlan]

Vietnamese has many more possible syllables than Mandarin. You can have t's and m's at the end of words for instance such as VIET NAM.

[atitarev]

This applies to many Chinese dialects including Cantonese. Vietnamese has also a limited set of consonants, although larger than any Chinese dialect. What southern dialects gain in the number of finals northern dialects gain in the number of initials, such as sh, zh and r as added.

[Dennis]

This forum, which should help people with questions about the Chinese language, is beginning to sound like an ordinary chatbox.

So let me set some ' RULES '

Rule 1 The Chinese language is a different language than English or Japanese!!!!!!!!!!

If you would try to learn Chinese the English way or the Japanese way then you are heading for serious trouble.

Rule 2 Unless you have a specific personal reason to do so otherwise , all people who want to learn the Chinese Language should start with Standard Mandarin and after mastering that then you could learn any other dialect.

When you have mastered Mandarin and say for example mastered Cantonese then all those supid questions about the similarities and differencies disappear because having mastered those languages you will have known the answers already.

Rule 3 STOOOOOOP!!!!!!! debating about the Romanization of Chinese and Japanese.

Their Goverments have done that and failed because the reason why chinese and non- chinese failed to be literated in the past were not the characters but the lack of a good educational system.

[nipponman]

Originally posted by : atitarev

I wouldn't make any conclusions, Nipponman. Everyone's got what they wanted to hear but to really find out, IMHO a research would be needed with Chinese Mandarin speakers.

Not sure I quite understand.

Originally posted by : fenlan

I didn't fully understand yǔsù 、yǔsùzǔ, does this mean "morphemes and groups of morphemes"? The point about getting the neutral tone right is that once a block of text is pinyinized, relying on just pronunciation, then the tonal values all matter. hécheng is easier to understand than héchéng, because it corresponds to the pronunciation better. Similarly, fēnwéi rather than fēnwèi.

Right, if you're to have a pinyin system tone marks and those kind of things are very important. Fen1 wei2 is right, but he2 cheng2 is in my dictionary, NJStar, and CQuickTrans, so that must be the official pronunciation, not the colloquial one.

Originally posted by : atitarev

Romanized examples should be tested on Chinese people, not on learners. Pinyin generated from NJStar is far from perfect - main problem is with segmentation and that the words are not joined, no need to separate "Riben" into ri and ben.

True, if Skylee and Quest want to take a stab at it, they're free to try:D . But, I seperated the words. Basically, I wanted to see how far you could take a pinyin system, the upper limits of understandability. So far, I've learned that you need to keep words together, tone marks must be correct, and pronunciation must be perfect. Which leads me to this thought, what if someone, while writing a pinyin book or article, made a typo, like I did? May lead to a lot of frustrations...

nipponman

[nipponman]

This forum, which should help people with questions about the Chinese language, is beginning to sound like an ordinary chatbox.

So let me set some ' RULES '

Rule 1 The Chinese language is a different language than English or Japanese!!!!!!!!!!

If you would try to learn Chinese the English way or the Japanese way then you are heading for serious trouble.

Rule 2 Unless you have a specific personal reason to do so otherwise , all people who want to learn the Chinese Language should start with Standard Mandarin and after mastering that then you could learn any other dialect.

When you have mastered Mandarin and say for example mastered Cantonese then all those supid questions about the similarities and differencies disappear because having mastered those languages you will have known the answers already.

Rule 3 STOOOOOOP!!!!!!! debating about the Romanization of Chinese and Japanese.

Their Goverments have done that and failed because the reason why chinese and non- chinese failed to be literated in the past were not the characters but the lack of a good educational system.

Erm, I don't know if you noticed or not, but this is all a response to a genuine question about Chinese. And though there have been movements on the romanization of both languages, that is not really in debate here. What we're talking about is, the feasabilty and practicality of a romanization system. I don't think anyone here is actually suggesting that that should take place.

nipponman

P.s. It must be hard to read all 8, 9 pages of this discussion8)

[atitarev]

To Nipponman

>>Not sure I quite understand.

I mean that everyone sees the result they want to see and because nobody changes their opinion, the discussion is probably useless, everyone will just add more arguments to defend their point of view.

True, if Skylee and Quest want to take a stab at it, they're free to try . But, I seperated the words. Basically, I wanted to see how far you could take a pinyin system, the upper limits of understandability. So far, I've learned that you need to keep words together, tone marks must be correct, and pronunciation must be perfect. Which leads me to this thought, what if someone, while writing a pinyin book or article, made a typo, like I did? May lead to a lot of frustrations...

Quest had a go and although he did not approve the idea, he said he did undestand pinyin text (although slower and with more difficulty).

Typo in pinyin is the same as typo in characters, which happen vey often both in electronic and hand-written texts, hand-written typos, IMHO are more likely. Of course, wrong tone mark will confuse, will the wrong character not? I don't quite agree with Fenlan about the fifth tone but there are no set rules about it.

To Dennis,

Your post is too aggressive. What's these exclamation marks for? Next post you'll write in all caps? We're free to discuss what we want to discuss. No, we are not suggesting anything, it's up to the Chinese people and government.

[Dennis]

talking about the feasability and practicality of a romanization system.

You either do it or you don't and both goverments did and failed.

You CANNOT write Chinese solely in Pinyin and although you CAN write Japanese solely in Romaji , Katakana, or Hiragana the mix of Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji is prefered.

You will need Hanzi/Kanji otherwise a lot of the language is lost.

Nipponman you have studied Japanese. in what system is Musashi easier to read?

Romaji , Hiragana or Kanji?

[atitarev]

As I said - first exclamation marks, then all caps posts.

Dennis, if you haven't noticed, Nipponman argues in favour of characters.

[nipponman]

To Dennis>むさしとは?

To me, kanji is always better, then hiragana, then romaji. But I can read in all of them.

This might sound weird but, when I first started learning Japanese (and Chinese as well) I never bought or read any learning material that was written entirely in romaji or pinyin (well, except one chinese book, chinese grammar books are hard to find...) but I tried to avoid them, because I wasn't trying to learn English.

Anyway, Dennis, I think I know you from somewhere, and your mention of Japanese solidifies this hunch, perchance, have you ever participated in discussions on Teach Yourself Japanese's forum by Takasugi-shinji? Anyway, we're kinda having a discussion here, it will be over soon...

Originally posted by : atitarev

I mean that everyone sees the result they want to see and because nobody changes their opinion, the discussion is probably useless, everyone will just add more arguments to defend their point of view.

Not me, I really want to see if it is practical (I pray that it is not though!) Not looking for more "converts", but I don't think it is possible without overthrowing the chinese culture.

nipponman

p.s. I finally learned what IMHO means!

[Dennis]

Anatoli what do you want?

A forum that solves the answers to the question that people have about learining the Chinese Language or a Chatbox asking stupid questions of which the answeres are perfectly clear if they would have bothered to have mastered the language first.

[atitarev]

Just a short one on practicality. A few books in series of "Teach Yourself..." and Colloqial ... and others have large texts and dialogs in pinyin only for learning purposes. I never got confused. You may say the texts are simple and more advanced would be harder to read in pure pinyin. I, myself use conversion to pinyin (using Wenlin) when I want to practice my tones, so that I have both piniyn and character texts and audio recording. I make sure I remember the pronunciation and tones first and then learn the characters for that dialog/text. If you specifically search for homophones and difficult puns you will find them a lot in Chinese - in standard everyday modern Chinese, they don't happen to often. Well, pinyin is not used for daily communication, so it's not being improved on. Knowing characters is critical for reading Chinese text and I am learning them but pinyin helps to build up my spoken vocabulary.

P.S. I converted "Teach Yourself Beginner's Chinese" completely to Chinese characters - all main dialogs, texts and exercises with audio.

[nipponman]

You seem kinda antagonistic Dennis, do you need some sleep or something? Why not wait 'till the discussion is over first, then bug everybody in a pm?(just kidding) Seriously though, we are trying to discuss this here. This is serious, two natives, Skylee and Quest who are masters of the language, have participated in this discussion already...

nipponman

[atitarev]

You seem kinda antagonistic Dennis, do you need some sleep or something?

I can't be bothered. I just ignore such people.

Nipponman, it's getting late. If there is something else to dicuss I will reply some time tomorrow.

[Dennis]

Shi shi shi shi shi shi ...etc or

石室诗士施氏...etc

Yes you could say

Shitou wuzi de shiren Shi xiansheng

But then again you could only read in Pinyin

Shitou wuzi de shiren Shi xiansheng because

Shi shi shi shi shi shi means nothing then only the sound SHI

But in characters you could read both

石头屋子的诗人施先生

石室诗士施氏

[nipponman]

True, I don't think Shibo intended this to become a back-and-forth kinda thing.

I can't be bothered. I just ignore such people.

Yeah but I think I know him from somewhere.

Anyway we are way off topic. I think we have basically covered all possibilities for this thread. Anyone else have anything to say?

nipponman

P.s

Originally posted by : Dennis

Shi shi shi shi shi shi ...etc or

石室诗士施氏...etc

This isn't fair, those would all have tone markers on them, but that poem would be incomprehensible, I think, if written in all pinyin, even with tone marks. Interesting.

nipponman

[nipponman]

I don't want to drag this discussion out, but I think this sentence kinda proves my point:

結構特點。詞或短語構成句子。 Now, look at huo4. It is clearly serving as Huo4 Zhe3, I am not sure that in literate writing you can just drop the zhe3 like this, maybe colloquially, but not in literate writing. But, because he is writing in characters, everyone will understand just huo4. maybe not if he just used pinyin.

nipponman