Interesting websites

[wix]

Just wanted to let people know about some interesting websites.

pinyin.info and romanization.com are probably most relevant to people in Taiwan, where despite the nation's mastery of traditional Chinese script they are yet to come to terms with the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet :? There's lots of interesting stuff here, in particular comparitive charts of various forms of romanisation.

Also check pinyin.info/readings for excerpts from some interesting books. I am currently reading Why is Chinese so damn hard? which seems to explain why I have been on a Chinese language learning plateau for the past three years!!! (and why you don't need to feel embarrassed about the fact that after five years of studying Chinese you still can't read anything more difficult than a street sign!).

[Guest Mike]

Thanks for that. I am at the very beginning of trying to learn Chinese and that 'Why is Chinese so damn hard' is a very interesting and amusing article but a bit off-putting though!! Still, I won't give up just yet. I've been struggling with Thai, which isn't as hard as Chinese looks but certainly has it's own set of difficulties, for 3 years or so with I think reasonable success in the end. So I hope there's going to be a tiny speck of light at the end of the very long and very dark tunnel of Chinese learning too!

Just a question, in that article he talks about the difficulty of spaces in the middle of the words and how that makes reading difficult. Is that really a big problem after you get used to it ?? It's the opposite in Thai where there's no spaces between any of the words, which sounds initally like it's going to make reading a nightmare but actually after a while you get used to it and it hardly presents any problems at all.

[wix]

Just a question, in that article he talks about the difficulty of spaces in the middle of the words and how that makes reading difficult. Is that really a big problem after you get used to it ?? It's the opposite in Thai where there's no spaces between any of the words, which sounds initally like it's going to make reading a nightmare but actually after a while you get used to it and it hardly presents any problems at all.

I think the reason is that as most Chinese words are made up of a combination of two or more characters it is often difficult to distinguish the boundaries between words. If you come across several characters you don't know in a sentence it might be difficult to figure out exactly which characters combine to make up a word or which ones are just there on their own.

I know Thai has no spaces, but the phonetics of the language allow you to figure out where one word ends and the next one begins.

I'm glad the article didn't put you off learning Chinese. It is difficult, but definitely not impossible. In fact if you have had some success learning Thai you won't find Chinese too hard. I never advanced past basic level in Thai myself.

[Guest Mike]

Hi Wix, thanks for your reply.

I know Thai has no spaces, but the phonetics of the language allow you to figure out where one word ends and the next one begins.

Well it's not really that straightforward, like this you can (usually) tell where syllables start and finish but finding word boudaries in a sentence with a fair bit of unusual vocabulary (e.g. สรอรรถแถลงการจับกุมปลาปิรันยา) can still be pretty challenging.

What I meant by it not usually being much of a problem was more that you get used to seeing certain words in combination with others, and once you know the basics there's only a small number of difficult words in any sentence. With decent guesswork you can often get the word boudaries right first time, even if you've never seen the words before. Is it much more difficult than this in Chinese then :?:

[wix]

I just found this very interesting website: Chinese Dialects

It includes information about the main Chinese languages -- Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, etc. In addition in the Taiwanese section there is a series of lessons. By hovering your mouse over the words you can hear them in a sound file!

[ChouDoufu]

I'm not a big fan of this article. Yes, learning Chinese characters are difficult. That's the only thing I agree with though. There are a lot of people who have a belief that writing systems should be phonetic (I find it incredibly ironic that a native English speaker is praising the English phonetic system. English phonetics don't make a lot of sense either--under pronunciation rules in english "ghoti" can sound like "fish). Well, obviously if a language had a phonetic alphabet, it makes it easier to write and read. But to say that All languages need to be phonetic is just ridiculous. What makes Chinese appealing to so many people are the characters. Without the characters, Chinese would be destroying thousands of years of history.

I don't think they should do that in order to appease people who want to learn the language. I've always found characters to be rewarding and intruiging.

Yes it's difficult, but it's the difficulties that make things interesting.

[wix]

I'm not a big fan of this article. Yes, learning Chinese characters are difficult. That's the only thing I agree with though. There are a lot of people who have a belief that writing systems should be phonetic...

ChouDoufu, I guess you are referring to the pinyin.info and romanization.com websites rather than the Chinese Dialects website. It is an interesting issue and I have quoted you to start a new topic in the "Reading and Writing" forum so you and others can discuss the issue further there. Click here to go the the new thread.

[ChouDoufu]

I'm not a big fan of this article. Yes' date=' learning Chinese characters are difficult. That's the only thing I agree with though. There are a lot of people who have a belief that writing systems should be phonetic...[/quote']

ChouDoufu, I guess you are referring to the pinyin.info and romanization.com websites rather than the Chinese Dialects website. It is an interesting issue and I have quoted you to start a new topic in the "Reading and Writing" forum so you and others can discuss the issue further there. Click here to go the the new thread.

Sorry wix, I was referring to the "Why is Chinese so Damn Hard" (http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/1991Moser.pdf) link in your original post...

[wix]

I found this website by Ron Gluckman, a freelance writer currently based in Beijing. There are lots of interesting articles about China as well as many other countries in Asia here.

Ron Gluckman's roving reporter pages