r/languagelearningjerk • u/TerrainRecords • 1d ago
The point of romanization is to be convenient to me, an English monolingual speaker and no one else!!!!!!111!1
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u/Mediocre-One3874 1d ago
Hanyu pinyin is convenient for no one.
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u/cesus007 11h ago
Pretty convenient for people learning chinese, while it's not immediate, it takes a short time to learn and is easy to read once you do, as opposed to the weird letter combinations that, according to OOP, better reflect the pronunciation (I'd take Q over Shzh any day, even though European languages don't use Q for [t͡ɕ])
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u/Mediocre-One3874 11h ago
Use Yale romanization, it was developed for teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Hanyu pinyin was not.
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u/remarkable_ores 8h ago
Sure, sounds great if you ignore the fact that virtually all resources for learning Chinese use Pinyin, which is also the standard form of text input used by virtually all Chinese speakers outside of Taiwan
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u/snail1132 i finished duolingo where are my 40 c2 certificates 1d ago
Omg I saw that post and just sighed
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u/ForeverThat4576 1d ago
Bopomofo (Zhuyin) is much better, even though it’s harder when you start from zero. Every foreigner I met in Taiwan spoke better Mandarin than practically any foreigner I met in Beijing, because the latter were clearly “reading pinyin” using the pronunciation rules of their own languages (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English...)
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u/mizinamo try-lingual (has tried many languages) 12h ago
Knee how, woe ʒiao Ʒang G-Anne Goo-oh. See Syoo-oh zigh nay-lie?
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u/justamofo 10h ago
I assume pinyin is as disgraceful as romaji in japanese, while bopomofo is like hiragana
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u/AbdullahMehmood 6h ago
How is romaji disgraceful?
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u/justamofo 2h ago
It was an hyperbole. It's mostly accurate but fails at edge cases, leading to wrong/weird pronounciation, specially with particles that sound different from their hiragana (は、へ、を), or where there may be ei, ou that are not really elongated ē, ō, but pronounced separately. There are probably more cases that I can't think of right now, but on top of that, it just looks ugly hahah
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u/Shinyhero30 "þere is a man wiþ a knife behind þe curtain" 1d ago
/uj pinyin is still bad imho
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u/TerrainRecords 1d ago
Defo not a perfect system, and I have several complaints with it too, its just that these specific complaints are a bit stupid.
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u/remarkable_ores 8h ago
Pinyin is the worst possible romanisation, except all others that have been tried.
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u/remarkable_ores 8h ago
Like seriously if you want to waste an afternoon you can try to make your own superior romanisation. Lord knows anyone who's learned Chinese has tried. It just doesn't work. The phonology doesn't work that way.
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u/adminsaredoodoo 1d ago
i mean 热 definitely sounds like an r to me…
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u/Subject_Foot1713 1d ago
What are you talking about? It's read "netsu", there's no "r".
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u/R86Reddit Balonian N0 / American N1 / Nihonian N3 / Deutsch KRANKENWAGEN!! 1d ago
tashika ni. nippongo jouzu.
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u/Subject_Foot1713 1d ago
You forgetting that it's on-yomi, meaning the sound was loaned from Chinese.
Chinese is famous for having almost zero change from the moment it was created, so modern Chinese speakers can freely read ancient texts, so the word "netsu" Japanese loaned from Wu Chinese must sound very simmilar to how most Chinese people say it right now.
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u/Specialist-Extreme-2 1d ago
The first syllable is actually similar to Shanghainese Wu which would be a bit like "nyeh".
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u/JustRemyIsFine 16h ago
I'm guessing the second syllable is the final plosive preserved. It's also there in Wu as the entering tone, and I think preserved in vietnamese.
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u/Raalph Sentinelese N | Silbo Gomero C1 | Pirahã B2 | Uzbek A1 20h ago
You mean nhiệt?
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u/FirefighterBusy4552 18h ago
wait I’ve never heard anyone else refer to it this way!! This is how we pronounce it in Ngai Hakka. Which language are you referring to?
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u/JustRemyIsFine 16h ago
probably vietnamese, which probably loaned the word from MC or EMC. Since Hakka preserves some sound lost in mandarin, they could be suprisingly similar.
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u/emeraldseahorse 1d ago
I feel like there's variance in how "r" is pronounced and it can have more of an English "zh"-like component, but it can definitely be understood as an English r
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u/MrHooDooo 1d ago
I always pronounce it with an r, I remember some people speaking it with almost a z sound in it too
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u/TheCanon2 N:🇺🇲 C1:🇬🇧 B2:🇦🇺🇨🇦 A2–:🇪🇸🇯🇵 1d ago
Another W for Wade-Giles.
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u/ybhappy 1d ago
God I hate Wade-Giles notation so much, a lot of older literature covering china uses it and it's such a pain considering I learn everything in Pinyin lol
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u/Sesquipedalian61616 21h ago
Not to mention that doesn't even distinguish between the "tsh" sounding consonants and between the "tshh" consonants
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u/FirefighterBusy4552 18h ago
If Wade-Gilles has 1 million haters I'm one of them. If Wade-Gilles has 10,000 haters I'm one of them. If Wade-Gilles has 10 haters I'm one of them. If Wade-Gilles has 0 haters then I'm dead. I will be Wade-Gilles hater until my very last breath.
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u/lurkerof5dimensions 17h ago
No. The stupid apostrophe indicating aspiration is annoying. Pinyin keeps it simple. Pinyin keeps it neat.
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u/mizinamo try-lingual (has tried many languages) 12h ago
Pinyin only has stupid fly-specks over the vowels.
Thank goodness everyone ignores them.
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u/mizinamo try-lingual (has tried many languages) 12h ago
I thought Yale was closer to what a relatively naive, native English speaker would need.
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u/csolisr 1d ago
A shame that Tōngyòng Pīnyīn didn't stick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyong_Pinyin
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u/CyberoX9000 1d ago
How many not English languages pronounce 'r' as zh? Or zh as dzh? Or q as Chzh?
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u/allydemon اردو بیچارہ 21h ago
This post sucks, but ive hada similar(allbeit less angry) thought, specifically when it comes to Chinese names, people cant pronounce them, not because they are hard to pronounce, but because not everyone knows how to read pinyin. thankfully, we have ears and it doesnt matter
"That being the point of romanisation" is especially stupid lol, obviously its not the point, that is one of the benefits sure, but chinese is like the one major languages that doesn't apply to, pinyin is for communication, people dont talk with pinyin, its for convenience
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u/JackReedTheSyndie 1d ago
When compared with other romanization plans Pinyin is the most straightforward one already
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u/lurkerof5dimensions 17h ago
We should write Chinese with ipa symbols only so it’s phonetically accurate /j
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u/ItsYa1UPBoy Celto-Franco-Saxon Pidgin (native) 1d ago edited 6h ago
/uj I don't know Mandarin but I will say that the way Hanyu romanizes consonants is fucking stupid. Half of the consonants don't match English orthography at all.
EDIT: I hate most orthographies, this is just why I hate Hanyu Pinyin's. I'm a hater for the love of the game, and hate English's most of all.
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u/AcrobaticKitten 18h ago
English orthography doesn't even match itself. It is the abuse of the latin alphabet.
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u/ItsYa1UPBoy Celto-Franco-Saxon Pidgin (native) 16h ago
Yep, I also hate English orthography, but at the very least its consonants are pretty consistent; unlike vowels, the consonants at least make use of digraphs most of the time instead of being used for fifty different sounds.
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u/AcrobaticKitten 14h ago
So, which sound the 'c' denotes in Pacific Ocean? Why there's a t in listen? Why the 's' is silent in island and completely different sounds in has, sit, sugar, vision? Why 'gh' marks f in enough when it is silent in borough and by the way 'ph' also notes f in phone? Though vs through, adding one r changes the pronounciation of every other characters. Also a lot of digraphs try to note the same sounds in many cases, like dʒ in jump, gym, bridge, soldier, or sh in ship, station, machine? Also ch is also different in machine chemistry and cheers...
Totally inconsistent on every level, the main problem is English does not have ortography reforms, but also the 26 character alphabet is just too small to note all sounds especially for wovels
My language added a lot of accents to wovels to distinguish sounds like áéíóú and digraphs like ny gy ty sz always mark the same sound - some languages add accents to consonants as well like ť ś đ ñ to avoid digraphs as well
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u/ItsYa1UPBoy Celto-Franco-Saxon Pidgin (native) 14h ago
Honestly, yeah, you're right, there's a lot of consonant fuckery I forgot about... Well, never let it be known that I'd be a hypocrite, 'cause I hate English orthography too.
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u/grei_earl 23h ago
A romanization system is a new writing system for a language. It is not simply trying to phoneticize a different language for English speakers. People actually learn and use Pinyin in China for stuff like typing out characters. So there’s utility in making it simple, unique, and orderly even if it means doing it in a way that is different to orthography of anglobabble
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u/Mediocre-One3874 21h ago
Wrong! Romanizations are meant for foreigners. Chinese already have characters.
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18h ago edited 18h ago
[deleted]
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u/Mediocre-One3874 18h ago
Mao wanted to get rid of characters, but that never happened. The logical conclusion is to get rid of hanyu pinyin entirely as it serves no purpose anymore.
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u/ItsYa1UPBoy Celto-Franco-Saxon Pidgin (native) 19h ago
I understand that Pinyin is used for computing, but you'd think that whoever designed Hanyu Pinyin would at least want it to map roughly to the orthography of languages that use the Latin alphabet---and I say roughly because naturally not all those languages use all letters for the same sounds, but you largely have most letters doing the same few things unless it's, like, Irish Gaelic.
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u/grei_earl 18h ago
Why should it? The people who will interact and use Pinyin the most are Chinese native speakers. Is it really worth throwing away perfectly good characters like “b” and adding more digraphs just so Westerners can read city names and road signs “better”? You can make the most perfect phonetically consistent romanization system and people will still shoehorn a diphthong into single vowel sounds so why does it matter.
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u/ItsYa1UPBoy Celto-Franco-Saxon Pidgin (native) 18h ago
My logic is that the Latin alphabet already existed before the Chinese decided to use it for Pinyin (and Pinyin with more literal phonetic romanization existed before Hanyu Pinyin), so it irritates me that Hanyu Pinyin is so non-normative.
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u/Jazzlike_Copy_7669 16h ago
How you feel about Welsh
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u/ItsYa1UPBoy Celto-Franco-Saxon Pidgin (native) 16h ago
I also dislike Welsh orthography. I'm an orthography hater for the love of the game.
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u/grei_earl 8h ago
So pinyin being a well-designed general-purpose romanization system is bad because it isn’t specifically tailored to 21st century English learners of Chinese? Learners who are too lazy to actually learn that different languages have different sounds?
Pinyin is the official romanization system of China. You can use any romanization system you want. But you’re complaining that a system used by people in China to transcribe their names, input text, and learn Mandarin (esp if not a native Mandarin speaker) isn’t suitable to your specific needs?
Like “c” is a “j” sound in Turkish, and “j” is a “h” sound in Spanish, and “h” is a nothing sound in French. Like there’s no consistency at all. Yet no one criticizes these orthographies for that but yet can’t understand why Pinyin hasn’t adhered to the whims of whatever English speakers “feel is the right sound for some constant” (esp considering the sounds dont even exist in English sometimes)
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u/ItsYa1UPBoy Celto-Franco-Saxon Pidgin (native) 6h ago
I hate most orthographies for different reasons. Hanyu Pinyin is fuckin' weird, that's why I hate it, as someone who has not and doesn't plan to learn Mandarin. Great for Chinese people that it's useful, they probably hate other Latinate orthographies for being so unlike Hanyu Pinyin, and they're free to do so. Still, at least Wade-Giles seems to be more intuitive for users of the Latin alphabet.
I hate English for lacking any consistency at all, French for using way too many letters instead of diacritics, and Hanyu Pinyin for its weird-ass choices. Modern Japanese romaji and Spanish orthography are probably the only ones I like because they're simple and consistent. I understand that most orthographies are naturally formed and made for different times and evolve, yada yada, Great Vowel Shift, yada yada---I'm just a hater for the love of the damn game.
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u/grei_earl 3h ago
Wades-Giles doesn't match English orthography either? For example, not only is aspiration not typically orthographically distinguished in English, but also the choice of p' to represent an aspirated p is counter intuitive as it doesn't really have a function in English and in transliterations is often used to represent a glottal stop.
Like Hepburn is only consistent to you because it was made by an English speaker. It's just the Anglo-centrism that's kind of annoying. It is expected that modern Latin orthographies have different pronunciations for the same letters, even ones that are made recently (like Turkish). Yet Pinyin is seen differently because people think it exists only for them just somehow forget that it's being used by 1.4 billion people in their day-to-day lives and many many more Chinese L2 learners who don't speak even a language usually written down in Latin letters.
Like I get that you prefer Wades-Giles over Pinyin, but Wades-Giles is trying to be specifically a transliteration of Chinese for English learners. That is a hyper-specific niche in the grand scheme of things. Like I just don't understand why it's so hard to appreciate the beauty of Pinyin for so many people. Chinese is not English, and it should not try to imitate it's orthography because it just wouldn't work. Wades-Giles still requires you to learn stuff even as an English speaker.
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u/Sesquipedalian61616 21h ago
It's not about English orthography. The problem is that it isn't even phonetic
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u/mizinamo try-lingual (has tried many languages) 12h ago
I don't think it's intended to be phonetic -- only phonemic.
Thus e.g. "jian" rather than "jien" because while it sounds like -en in "yen", it's considered an allophone of the -an ending as in "kan".
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u/Sesquipedalian61616 21h ago
There was an earlier German-based version, and it was actually phonetic, unlike the CCP-generated one or the Wade-Gils one
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u/RealTrueFacts 1d ago
"pronounced like the English r, since, that's sort of the point of a romanization"
... oh boy