I travel to Kaohsiung shortly and won’t be posting for a day or so. Meanwhile, lots of fun stuff is happening in the forum. I’m ready to abandon the open thread since the forum makes it irrelevant, but you can always consider the top post as a dumping ground for the extraneous comment.
April 26, 2006
The Discussion: 4 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
1
By Chairman Yao
Its -Gaoxiong- dammit ! ;o)
April 26, 2006 @ 9:38 am | Comment
2
By OtherLisa
Oh, god Chairman Yao – YES!
I may have my differences with the PRC, but Pinyin, dammit! Once you’ve gone there, you’ll never go back…
April 27, 2006 @ 12:05 am | Comment
3
By porkbarrel
Make sure and eat a lot of street food there. Kaoshiung has some of the best eating on the island. Pinyin is gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! This is Peking duck after all. It’s not like non-chinese speakers using pinin can be understood anyway, and it leads a lot of students to butcher chinese pronunciation, while thinking they are speaking correctly. Your choices are to use characters or a botch of spelling transcription. It doesn’t matter which transcription you use, since they’re artificial constructs to begin with. Let a thousand misconceptions bloom!
April 27, 2006 @ 9:39 am | Comment
4
By other lisa
I beg to differ. The first time I studied Chinese, our textbook used the Yale Romanization. Nowadays it’s Pinyin. What I like about Pinyin is that it doesn’t try to find phonetic equivalents to certain sounds which just don’t exist in say, English (e.g., using “q” and “x”). A good teacher teaches his/her students what the actual sounds are – the Pinyin is really more of a reminder of what the sounds are than an exact phonetic equivalent. Which is the same as in English, really. English spelling only approximates pronunciation, and in some cases, it’s completely illogical and seemingly unrelated to how the word is actually said.
Once you learn Pinyin, I think it’s a lot more logical and easier to remember than any of the other romanization systems I’ve seen. And you certainly aren’t going to learn Chinese pronunciation from characters.
April 27, 2006 @ 5:15 pm | Comment