Plosives: Voiced and unvoiced

[Brandon]

I've read in several places that unaspirated Mandarin plosives are different from unaspirated English plosives because they're voiced in English. But as far as I can tell, these letters only represent vocied sounds when they appear at the end of a syllable.

For example, when I say "dog," I voice the 'g' but not the 'd'. Conversely, when I say "god," I voice the 'd' but not the 'g'. I can voice the initial plosives, but it seems forced and unnatural. For me, at least, d/t, b/p, and g/k pairs are voiceless and distinguished by aspiration at the beginning of a word, but unaspirated and distuinguished by voicing at the end of a word. Am I the only one?

[zixingche]

I think I've read that initial b and d in English often gets de-voiced in continuous speech, and aspiration is the only reliable to to distinguish between b/p, d/t etc, same as in Chinese. That's why for English speakers the pinyin spelling of "dao" seems to be a more accurate representation for the Chinese sound than Wade-Giles "tao", (Wade-Giles "t" is unvoiced and unaspirated, same as pinyin "d"). The same goes for "beijing".