80sStar wrote:suntex01 wrote:Actually, I spoke to a linguistic who teaches Chinese in the US. And she agrees. It forces people to come off their native language and pronounce properly. It forces people to memorize the proper pronounciation.
Sorry, but you (as well as the teacher you are talking about) are arguing that all the Chinese in China don't speak Chinese, because they use pinyin to learn Chinese. You don't "memorize" accurate pronunciation. It's something that comes through proper practice, listening and reproducing what you hear, and not whatever symbols are used for reading. Most Taiwanese are ignorant about romanization, confuse it with English and wrongly assume that zhuyin is superior simply because they were told it is.
Its a good thing you're not the one with the PHD in linguistics from Columbia U. Your presumptions are incorrect. In fact, if you look back to the history of 注音, it dates 40 years before 拼音, its not just a Taiwanese thing. Just in 1958 the Communists decided to go the different route, as was the same with the rest of the chinese language they decided to use. Enough about the history, you are right about the practice and reproduction. But you gotta understand, practice is a type of memorization...
Its getting your brain to memorize how to pronounce properly. And yes it does matter what symbols are used, atleast for the foreign learners.
And I think the romanization of Chinese for both systems are based more on english than any other languages that use similar alphabet no? So saying ABC can have different pronounciations don't really apply in this case, as the case that ABC is not Chinese to begin with as well.
Wrong. Romanization isn't "based on English," nor is it intended only, or mainly, for English speakers. And, yes, the fact that roman letters can and do have different pronunciations in different languages does "apply" in this case. French speakers can learn to pronounce English words correctly, despite using the same characters. Ditto for German, Italian and so forth. Likewise, people can learn Chinese pronunciation correctly without using a system mainly only used in Taiwan (not that learning it would be a bad idea).[/quote]
You're sort of right about the romanization not based on english. Rather its based on the common pronounciation of the alphabets throughout the different languages.
Thats why you don't see the ~n or other characters used only in certain languages. Nevertheless, it is still based on a predetermined set of pronounciations not unique to mandrin when coming up with the match for 音, rather than the other way around, which would of been unique symbols to match the 音 (注音).
Also, you neglected the difference between native learners and foreign learners by bringing up the the example of the Chinese.
You do understand by the time most kids start learning pinyin, they pretty much have the pronounciation spoken part of the language down?
They use pinyin to break down the pronounciation they already know and learn new words and link words they know to the writing. Hence, they don't rely on the romanization to learn the different "音" of the mandrin dialect.
But for foreign learners its just the opposite. They use pinyin to first learn the "音" of the mandrin dialect and move on to whole words. Its similar when you learn Japanese. Except they have 50 of them in two formats. And trust me, usually when foreign learners see pinyin, espc. people of romanized language background such as english, spanish, italians and etc. will either treat prounciation as their own language or english. You can still hear the difference between in 音 such as ㄓ ㄔ.
Another example is if you listen to spanish, italians or even french speak english. Alot of times, their "A" would only be pronounced as in "AH" and also other things as well.
And its similar when english speaking people learn spanish at first, they don't speak spanish, they speak english with spanish words.
This is also true with people trying to learn Japanese.
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