7 ms·

pinyin is not nearly as good as zhuyin in regards to phonetic representation. as one example, some words like pinyin's /zhun/ look like they should have one sy

pinyin is not nearly as good as zhuyin in regards to phonetic representation. as one example, some words like pinyin's /zhun/ look like they should have one syllable, but there's actually two, as far as i can tell. or at the least, the schwa is definitely missing from the pinyin representation, as in, it's not /zhu@n/, where @ is the schwa. pinyin is rife with oversights like this, that a learner has no idea about, and indeed instructional guides don't even mention much of the time. if you're serious about learning chinese, don't use pinyin unless you want to spend extra time undoing the damage done by doing so.

PutinIsEvil 10y ago
Sorry can you please elaborate? When I see 我, Wǒ. What do you propose I should do?
- yichi 10y ago
  I'm against Pinyin for the same reason as why I'm against using Romaji for learning Japanese. Pinyin and Romaji uses latin alphabet for representing sounds in a foreign language and if you are a native English speaker like most of us on HN, it's really bad because your brain will try to associate your knowledge of English with Pinyin you are reading. If you use Zhuyin for Chinese, or the Kana system for Japanese, you are telling your brain to start learning the phonetic system from scratch, which makes learning Chinese or Japanese a lot easier phonetically at least.
  - ionforce 10y ago
    Are you opposed to using it as a learning device to help bootstrap? Or are you referring more to its long-term, continued use? Or its use at all?
    - yichi 10y ago
      I'm opposed to using it for beginners who aren't familiar with the phonetic system of the language. Once you learned the phonetic system properly, and you know the character's in Romaji and Pinyin don't represent the sound you know in English, of course it's then helpful for learning how to type Japanese or Chinese. Don't get me wrong, Romaji has useful purposes, such as representing place names in Japan for foreigners, etc. But as a learning device for learning Japanese, it's not a very good one.
  - tjallingt 10y ago
    Except that if you use a western keyboard you still need to learn Pinyin or Romaji in order to be able to type the language. In my own attempts to learn a little bit of Japanese I've noticed that it is indeed difficult to associate the 'new' characters to the correct sound without using Romaji as an intermediate representation but my hope is that the more I learn and interact with the language the less this is the case. I think that, especially when using online learning tools, learning Romaji is inevitable and don't think that learning the phonetic system 'from scratch' makes it easier (if it is even possible to completely forget about your own phonetic/alphabetic system). In short, as a starting learner of Japanese I acknowledge that the problem you describe exists but think that 'really bad' is an overstatement and it is almost inevitable that your brain associates your old knowledge of English (or other languages) to the new language.
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      >"Except that if you use a western keyboard you still need to learn Pinyin or Romaji in order to be able to type the language." No you don't. I type in zhuyin every day. The sounds line up in order of the alphabet, starting with ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, in the left column. It's actually easier than touch typing English.
      - philliphaydon 10y ago
        As someone who only knows English, and is learning Mandarin / Traditional Chinese. I agree that Zhuyin is easier than Pinyin.
      - paradite 10y ago
        So you have a zhuyin keyboard and is suggesting everyone to buy one in order to type Chinese?
        xiaoma 10y ago
        No. That's wrong on both counts. Please re-read my comment.
  - hgfdhjtyd 10y ago
    I learned Chinese in Taiwan with Zhuyin, as a child. The first thing the teachers got was instruction in Zhuyin, and the way our books and teachers taught Zhuyin was by giving latin characters and English words with corresponding letters. Just looking at Zhuyin did not tell my English-trained brain I was learning new sounds from scratch. In college I was taught Pinyin and we were given instruction on the correct pronunciation of each phonetic sound, positioning of the tongue etc., and the teacher spent time drilling us on that. What matters is good instruction. Using Romanization doesn't encourage more correct pronunciation. Roman and Cyrillic alphabets are used for all manner of languages with completely different phonologies.
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      Honestly, once you know either pinyin or zhuyin, learning the other is trivial. It took under a day for me to get it 95% down and then with some regular usage it was done. But one effect was I found I had a much easier time keeping sounds straight than my fellow learners who often confused sounds that had less straight-forward mappings in the system they learned. Learning IPA on top is an extreme but still useful third point of attack and again, it's trivial compared to the difficulty of actually learning to hear the sounds clearly. It must have been a year before I realized how different the d in pinyin and the d in English were.
- imjustsaying 10y ago
  我 /wǒ/ in isolation in pinyin isn't so bad, but problems arise when you actually use it with another word, or in other words, almost always. What I'm about to mention here isn't unique to pinyin, and seems to be one fault you'll find in most (if not all?) transcriptions of tonal languages: a major problem is that they don't represent tone sandhi well if at all. For for example, you say 我家, you don't say /wǒjiā/, it's more like /wo(short flat low tone)jiā/, instead of /wo(medium-low falling rising tone)jiā/ like wǒjiā would seem to indicate.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
    I'm a beginner to Chinese so maybe I'm misled, but I find it quite silly that all books and tutorials describe the third tone as "falling-rising". This is something that left me scratching my head at the beginning of my learning because the descriptions in courses just didn't match what I was hearing. From what I hear, it seems to just be a short low tone the majority of the time, as you describe in 我家. Then it becomes a second tone before a third tone, as books say. But I hardly ever hear it as a falling-rising tone. Practically only when it's pronounced in isolation (e.g. when one is counting). So I wonder why the least frequent case is presented as the rule and the most frequent case is often not presented at all... maybe tradition from old pronunciations of Chinese?
jason_slack 10y ago
"if you're serious about learning chinese, don't use pinyin unless you want to spend extra time undoing the damage done by doing so." Please explain this. I have been learning Mandarin, can you tell me what damage has been done to me? Can you show us an concrete example of pinyin vs zhuyin and why zhuyin is a better choice? Let us start small: Dàjiā hǎo. Dàjiā hǎo ma? (大家好. 大家好吗？)
- imjustsaying 10y ago
  Pinyin lures second-language learners into a false sense of understanding what is actually being said. Take the first letter, d, for example. That's not a d like you would understand it in other latin-letter-based languages. It's actually more like a t. And actually it's not even like a t, it's more like an unaspirated t. More information is available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology I'd like to see an IPA-based Chinese dictionary, for example, but I won't be holding my breath. IPA suffers from its own problems in that it seems like its under constant revision, but damn if it's not the most useful tool in understanding the phonology of arbitrary languages.
  - jason_slack 10y ago
    "Take the first letter, d, for example. That's not a d like you would understand it in other latin-letter-based languages. It's actually more like a t. And actually it's not even like a t, it's more like an unaspirated t." I can understand this point, but how is it damaging me? I guess I view this as a "rule" of learning the language. How would zhuyin had done this better? Thanks for the link too. Edit: Thinking about this more, other languages have characters that you pronounce differently that what is written. Spanish for example has a bit of this. As other tonal languages do too.
    - imjustsaying 10y ago
      >I can understand this point, but how is it damaging me? Were you pronouncing it as /d/ before or were you pronuncing it as an unaspirated /t/? The problem is that with pinyin, people assume it's a /d/ sound, and their language learning books never tell them it's not a /d/. Conversely, when Chinese people then go to learn other languages, they see a d and say something like unaspirated /t/, and then they wonder why they can never sound like the natives when they try to say d. If you only relied on pinyin, you'd just always sound wrong and no one would tell you, and you'd never figure it out that it was the faulty phonetic system that hypnotized you into saying something almost the complete wrong way. Then you get stereotypes like "all Chinese people sound like impression", when they don't have to, but they have these misleading learning tools that are making them sound that way. edit as a reply (thread reply limit reached): Here's a concrete example of a failure of pinyin: Consider that 也 is /yě/, and 得 is /de/. Except actually, the two e's are not the same sound. In IPA, the vowels are e and ɤ, respectively. Zhuyin also correctly makes the vowel distinction with ㄜ and ㄝ. Pinyin as written does not show a difference between these two distinct sounds, whereas zhuyin does. Also, take a look at the example for /zhun/ that I give above for pinyin neglecting to show the addition of an entire syllable of a schwa.
keiferski 10y ago
Wouldn't this be offset by being familiar with another Latin-alphabet-based language? For example, in German, the letter "s" sounds like an English "z" and the letter "v" sounds like an English "f." At that point, you've already disassociated the specific sound from its letter. How is Mandarin/Pinyin any different?
- imjustsaying 10y ago
  It is indeed a problem for any language that reuses another language's symbols and attempts to jam them into place to fit the phonology of its own. When a language adopts the symbols of others of a nearby language relative, the fit can sometimes turn out ok, but of course you'll still have some bumps. But the poor suit is especially apparent when, for example, you try to throw the Latin alphabet into a tonal Sino-Tibetan language. I'd much rather learn 400 new unique phonetic symbols (or one set of IPA) than have to learn 26 alternate pronunciations whose sounds will compete with the pronunciations that fire off in my brain due to knowing the German, French, Spanish, English and Hungarian varieties of pronunciations of that same letter.
  - nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
    Most languages of the world are written primarily in Latin characters. The only language these characters were designed for is long dead. The reason for switching to Latin characters has nothing to do with phonetics and everything to do with making the language more practical to use with computers. Keyboards with 400 keys don't really work. Countless other languages with no relation to English have been using romanized alphabets for many years. Your argument that Chinese is any different doesn't make sense.
    - Markoff 10y ago
      most languages maybe, not so sure about most of the population when already India and China have more than 37% of works population plus most of the Muslim world and you end up with fact you are just reinforcing your Western view of world, while by statistics our Latin writing systems are in minority but because of our wealth we feel superior to think it's the easiest and fastest way to write
ptx 10y ago
What is this "zhun" that's actually two syllables? How do you write it in hanzi? (I'm just a beginner trying to understand.)
- imjustsaying 10y ago
  pinyin's /zhǔn/ as in 準 in zhuyin is ㄓㄨㄣ. in IPA, it sounds like /ʈʂuən/, and no it's not a diphthong here as far as i know. If you just read the pinyin, you wouldn't know the schwa was there at all.
  - paradite 10y ago
    You sound like you know a lot of this. But educate me how ㄓㄨㄣ is supposed to better describe 準 as two syllables? Both looks like three syllables to me, with zh/u/n or ㄓ/ㄨ/ㄣ. In fact why is that word even two syllables? From what I understand, if two vowels are together (in English), it counts as one syllable only.
    - footpath 10y ago
      I'm curious about that as well - I have always thought "zhun" is one syllable. There can be confusions though - the standard way of writing pinyin groups whole words rather than individual characters, so something like "xian" may represent either "西安" (two syllables) or "先" (one syllable).
      - imjustsaying 10y ago
        You know, it could be one syllable. This is a topic that I've tried to search for specific answers for before but I couldn't find definitive information about it. When I listen to recordings and to people speaking it, it sounds like two, which the Zhuyin seems to support.
        paradite 10y ago
        Uhm... Not sure about that. I speak Chinese everyday for the past 20 years and it sounds like one syllable to me.
natch 10y ago
This is complete and utter nonsense. First of all, plenty of native speakers of, say, Cantonese and other regional languages of Chinese, learn Mandarin using pinyin, and they do just fine. Second, as a non-native speaker, the advantages of not having to stumble over zhuyin and its problems hugely outweigh any advantage it might be wrongly thought to have. And the benefits continue well past the learning stage. The /zhun/ example isn't even true. That sound is sometimes broken down for students as multiple sounds, not syllables, for pedagogical purposes when the teachers are trying to get through to a student. That's the case with either pinyin or zhuyin. They explain it as multiple component sounds (not syllables) because the underlying whacky Chinese phonetic theory says it is made up of multiple sounds. (By the way this theory takes about 10 seconds to learn, so the fact that sounds can be broken down into smaller parts is not some mind-boggling obstacle.) If you were taught that it has two syllables, you may want to consider the possibility that your teacher is fuzzy on the meaning of the English word "syllable." If teachers are using zhuyin, they also break the sounds down to justify or explain how zhuyin works, since zhuyin is so oddly counterintuitive it needs extra explanation to help ease the cognitive burden of using it (which could be the reason it was reformed and mostly dumped decades ago in mainland China to be replaced by pinyin). Zhuyin does survive in Taiwan, where they keep it around for political reasons. Accepting a superior mainland system would be a linguistic defeat, and would damage their pride, so they cling to an archaic system. They don't want to admit this outright, so they come up with all sorts of reasons to keep it, and they end up not learning pinyin well themselves, so with that handicap they then try to convince naive foreign students that zhuyin is good. Don't fall for it if you like, let's see... touch typing, reading signs that are written in pinyin, being able to write down the sounds of Characters you haven't learned yet and have them readable by the average Chinese person, and focusing your time and efforts in the right places. A better argument on your side of the issue would be to say that pinyin is bad because the 'z' and 'h' and 'u' and 'n' are four separate symbols, but zhun is one syllable, so it's (you could say) confusing to the mind (it's not). But that's simply ridiculous. Users of phonetic languages, as all of us are, are perfectly accustomed to seeing multiple sounds and syllables for that matter represented by a number of symbols that does not necessarily correspond to the number of letters. Mostly the great thing about pinyin is it just does its job transparently without being a distraction. It becomes invisible almost, because since the letters are familiar and the sounds are already readable right off the bat, I can focus on the language and learning words and sounds correctly, instead of having an extra layer in between me and the language. Pinyin has served me well as a learner, and the results are hard to argue with. I didn't start learning until my 20s, and now pass as a native speaker over the phone. So... don't listen to that guy. Pinyin is great.
imjustsaying 10y ago
For some reason I can't edit my old posts, so I'm making a new one. But after further investigation I'd like to point out that in Zhuyin, just because there's two vowel-containing symbols, it doesn't necessarily mean there's two vowels. And the more I think about it, the more it does seem there's one syllable. And if /zhun/ does have two syllables, it would seem to be fairly unique. I've asked a Chinese speaker about syllables before, and they didn't understand what I was trying to say. So if a Chinese speaker could chime in on this, it would be much appreciated, because I've been trying to get concise information on this for a while, and I probably shouldn't be telling the internets that it's two syllables if it's actually one.

PutinIsEvil 10y ago

Sorry can you please elaborate? When I see 我, Wǒ. What do you propose I should do?

yichi 10y ago
I'm against Pinyin for the same reason as why I'm against using Romaji for learning Japanese. Pinyin and Romaji uses latin alphabet for representing sounds in a foreign language and if you are a native English speaker like most of us on HN, it's really bad because your brain will try to associate your knowledge of English with Pinyin you are reading. If you use Zhuyin for Chinese, or the Kana system for Japanese, you are telling your brain to start learning the phonetic system from scratch, which makes learning Chinese or Japanese a lot easier phonetically at least.
- ionforce 10y ago
  Are you opposed to using it as a learning device to help bootstrap? Or are you referring more to its long-term, continued use? Or its use at all?
  - yichi 10y ago
    I'm opposed to using it for beginners who aren't familiar with the phonetic system of the language. Once you learned the phonetic system properly, and you know the character's in Romaji and Pinyin don't represent the sound you know in English, of course it's then helpful for learning how to type Japanese or Chinese. Don't get me wrong, Romaji has useful purposes, such as representing place names in Japan for foreigners, etc. But as a learning device for learning Japanese, it's not a very good one.
- tjallingt 10y ago
  Except that if you use a western keyboard you still need to learn Pinyin or Romaji in order to be able to type the language. In my own attempts to learn a little bit of Japanese I've noticed that it is indeed difficult to associate the 'new' characters to the correct sound without using Romaji as an intermediate representation but my hope is that the more I learn and interact with the language the less this is the case. I think that, especially when using online learning tools, learning Romaji is inevitable and don't think that learning the phonetic system 'from scratch' makes it easier (if it is even possible to completely forget about your own phonetic/alphabetic system). In short, as a starting learner of Japanese I acknowledge that the problem you describe exists but think that 'really bad' is an overstatement and it is almost inevitable that your brain associates your old knowledge of English (or other languages) to the new language.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    >"Except that if you use a western keyboard you still need to learn Pinyin or Romaji in order to be able to type the language." No you don't. I type in zhuyin every day. The sounds line up in order of the alphabet, starting with ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, in the left column. It's actually easier than touch typing English.
    - philliphaydon 10y ago
      As someone who only knows English, and is learning Mandarin / Traditional Chinese. I agree that Zhuyin is easier than Pinyin.
    - paradite 10y ago
      So you have a zhuyin keyboard and is suggesting everyone to buy one in order to type Chinese?
      - xiaoma 10y ago
        No. That's wrong on both counts. Please re-read my comment.
- hgfdhjtyd 10y ago
  I learned Chinese in Taiwan with Zhuyin, as a child. The first thing the teachers got was instruction in Zhuyin, and the way our books and teachers taught Zhuyin was by giving latin characters and English words with corresponding letters. Just looking at Zhuyin did not tell my English-trained brain I was learning new sounds from scratch. In college I was taught Pinyin and we were given instruction on the correct pronunciation of each phonetic sound, positioning of the tongue etc., and the teacher spent time drilling us on that. What matters is good instruction. Using Romanization doesn't encourage more correct pronunciation. Roman and Cyrillic alphabets are used for all manner of languages with completely different phonologies.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    Honestly, once you know either pinyin or zhuyin, learning the other is trivial. It took under a day for me to get it 95% down and then with some regular usage it was done. But one effect was I found I had a much easier time keeping sounds straight than my fellow learners who often confused sounds that had less straight-forward mappings in the system they learned. Learning IPA on top is an extreme but still useful third point of attack and again, it's trivial compared to the difficulty of actually learning to hear the sounds clearly. It must have been a year before I realized how different the d in pinyin and the d in English were.
imjustsaying 10y ago
我 /wǒ/ in isolation in pinyin isn't so bad, but problems arise when you actually use it with another word, or in other words, almost always. What I'm about to mention here isn't unique to pinyin, and seems to be one fault you'll find in most (if not all?) transcriptions of tonal languages: a major problem is that they don't represent tone sandhi well if at all. For for example, you say 我家, you don't say /wǒjiā/, it's more like /wo(short flat low tone)jiā/, instead of /wo(medium-low falling rising tone)jiā/ like wǒjiā would seem to indicate.
- Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
  I'm a beginner to Chinese so maybe I'm misled, but I find it quite silly that all books and tutorials describe the third tone as "falling-rising". This is something that left me scratching my head at the beginning of my learning because the descriptions in courses just didn't match what I was hearing. From what I hear, it seems to just be a short low tone the majority of the time, as you describe in 我家. Then it becomes a second tone before a third tone, as books say. But I hardly ever hear it as a falling-rising tone. Practically only when it's pronounced in isolation (e.g. when one is counting). So I wonder why the least frequent case is presented as the rule and the most frequent case is often not presented at all... maybe tradition from old pronunciations of Chinese?

jason_slack 10y ago

"if you're serious about learning chinese, don't use pinyin unless you want to spend extra time undoing the damage done by doing so." Please explain this. I have been learning Mandarin, can you tell me what damage has been done to me? Can you show us an concrete example of pinyin vs zhuyin and why zhuyin is a better choice? Let us start small: Dàjiā hǎo. Dàjiā hǎo ma? (大家好. 大家好吗？)

imjustsaying 10y ago
Pinyin lures second-language learners into a false sense of understanding what is actually being said. Take the first letter, d, for example. That's not a d like you would understand it in other latin-letter-based languages. It's actually more like a t. And actually it's not even like a t, it's more like an unaspirated t. More information is available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology I'd like to see an IPA-based Chinese dictionary, for example, but I won't be holding my breath. IPA suffers from its own problems in that it seems like its under constant revision, but damn if it's not the most useful tool in understanding the phonology of arbitrary languages.
- jason_slack 10y ago
  "Take the first letter, d, for example. That's not a d like you would understand it in other latin-letter-based languages. It's actually more like a t. And actually it's not even like a t, it's more like an unaspirated t." I can understand this point, but how is it damaging me? I guess I view this as a "rule" of learning the language. How would zhuyin had done this better? Thanks for the link too. Edit: Thinking about this more, other languages have characters that you pronounce differently that what is written. Spanish for example has a bit of this. As other tonal languages do too.
  - imjustsaying 10y ago
    >I can understand this point, but how is it damaging me? Were you pronouncing it as /d/ before or were you pronuncing it as an unaspirated /t/? The problem is that with pinyin, people assume it's a /d/ sound, and their language learning books never tell them it's not a /d/. Conversely, when Chinese people then go to learn other languages, they see a d and say something like unaspirated /t/, and then they wonder why they can never sound like the natives when they try to say d. If you only relied on pinyin, you'd just always sound wrong and no one would tell you, and you'd never figure it out that it was the faulty phonetic system that hypnotized you into saying something almost the complete wrong way. Then you get stereotypes like "all Chinese people sound like impression", when they don't have to, but they have these misleading learning tools that are making them sound that way. edit as a reply (thread reply limit reached): Here's a concrete example of a failure of pinyin: Consider that 也 is /yě/, and 得 is /de/. Except actually, the two e's are not the same sound. In IPA, the vowels are e and ɤ, respectively. Zhuyin also correctly makes the vowel distinction with ㄜ and ㄝ. Pinyin as written does not show a difference between these two distinct sounds, whereas zhuyin does. Also, take a look at the example for /zhun/ that I give above for pinyin neglecting to show the addition of an entire syllable of a schwa.

keiferski 10y ago

Wouldn't this be offset by being familiar with another Latin-alphabet-based language? For example, in German, the letter "s" sounds like an English "z" and the letter "v" sounds like an English "f." At that point, you've already disassociated the specific sound from its letter. How is Mandarin/Pinyin any different?

imjustsaying 10y ago
It is indeed a problem for any language that reuses another language's symbols and attempts to jam them into place to fit the phonology of its own. When a language adopts the symbols of others of a nearby language relative, the fit can sometimes turn out ok, but of course you'll still have some bumps. But the poor suit is especially apparent when, for example, you try to throw the Latin alphabet into a tonal Sino-Tibetan language. I'd much rather learn 400 new unique phonetic symbols (or one set of IPA) than have to learn 26 alternate pronunciations whose sounds will compete with the pronunciations that fire off in my brain due to knowing the German, French, Spanish, English and Hungarian varieties of pronunciations of that same letter.
- nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
  Most languages of the world are written primarily in Latin characters. The only language these characters were designed for is long dead. The reason for switching to Latin characters has nothing to do with phonetics and everything to do with making the language more practical to use with computers. Keyboards with 400 keys don't really work. Countless other languages with no relation to English have been using romanized alphabets for many years. Your argument that Chinese is any different doesn't make sense.
  - Markoff 10y ago
    most languages maybe, not so sure about most of the population when already India and China have more than 37% of works population plus most of the Muslim world and you end up with fact you are just reinforcing your Western view of world, while by statistics our Latin writing systems are in minority but because of our wealth we feel superior to think it's the easiest and fastest way to write

ptx 10y ago

What is this "zhun" that's actually two syllables? How do you write it in hanzi? (I'm just a beginner trying to understand.)

imjustsaying 10y ago
pinyin's /zhǔn/ as in 準 in zhuyin is ㄓㄨㄣ. in IPA, it sounds like /ʈʂuən/, and no it's not a diphthong here as far as i know. If you just read the pinyin, you wouldn't know the schwa was there at all.
- paradite 10y ago
  You sound like you know a lot of this. But educate me how ㄓㄨㄣ is supposed to better describe 準 as two syllables? Both looks like three syllables to me, with zh/u/n or ㄓ/ㄨ/ㄣ. In fact why is that word even two syllables? From what I understand, if two vowels are together (in English), it counts as one syllable only.
  - footpath 10y ago
    I'm curious about that as well - I have always thought "zhun" is one syllable. There can be confusions though - the standard way of writing pinyin groups whole words rather than individual characters, so something like "xian" may represent either "西安" (two syllables) or "先" (one syllable).
    - imjustsaying 10y ago
      You know, it could be one syllable. This is a topic that I've tried to search for specific answers for before but I couldn't find definitive information about it. When I listen to recordings and to people speaking it, it sounds like two, which the Zhuyin seems to support.
      - paradite 10y ago
        Uhm... Not sure about that. I speak Chinese everyday for the past 20 years and it sounds like one syllable to me.

natch 10y ago

This is complete and utter nonsense. First of all, plenty of native speakers of, say, Cantonese and other regional languages of Chinese, learn Mandarin using pinyin, and they do just fine. Second, as a non-native speaker, the advantages of not having to stumble over zhuyin and its problems hugely outweigh any advantage it might be wrongly thought to have. And the benefits continue well past the learning stage. The /zhun/ example isn't even true. That sound is sometimes broken down for students as multiple sounds, not syllables, for pedagogical purposes when the teachers are trying to get through to a student. That's the case with either pinyin or zhuyin. They explain it as multiple component sounds (not syllables) because the underlying whacky Chinese phonetic theory says it is made up of multiple sounds. (By the way this theory takes about 10 seconds to learn, so the fact that sounds can be broken down into smaller parts is not some mind-boggling obstacle.) If you were taught that it has two syllables, you may want to consider the possibility that your teacher is fuzzy on the meaning of the English word "syllable." If teachers are using zhuyin, they also break the sounds down to justify or explain how zhuyin works, since zhuyin is so oddly counterintuitive it needs extra explanation to help ease the cognitive burden of using it (which could be the reason it was reformed and mostly dumped decades ago in mainland China to be replaced by pinyin). Zhuyin does survive in Taiwan, where they keep it around for political reasons. Accepting a superior mainland system would be a linguistic defeat, and would damage their pride, so they cling to an archaic system. They don't want to admit this outright, so they come up with all sorts of reasons to keep it, and they end up not learning pinyin well themselves, so with that handicap they then try to convince naive foreign students that zhuyin is good. Don't fall for it if you like, let's see... touch typing, reading signs that are written in pinyin, being able to write down the sounds of Characters you haven't learned yet and have them readable by the average Chinese person, and focusing your time and efforts in the right places. A better argument on your side of the issue would be to say that pinyin is bad because the 'z' and 'h' and 'u' and 'n' are four separate symbols, but zhun is one syllable, so it's (you could say) confusing to the mind (it's not). But that's simply ridiculous. Users of phonetic languages, as all of us are, are perfectly accustomed to seeing multiple sounds and syllables for that matter represented by a number of symbols that does not necessarily correspond to the number of letters. Mostly the great thing about pinyin is it just does its job transparently without being a distraction. It becomes invisible almost, because since the letters are familiar and the sounds are already readable right off the bat, I can focus on the language and learning words and sounds correctly, instead of having an extra layer in between me and the language. Pinyin has served me well as a learner, and the results are hard to argue with. I didn't start learning until my 20s, and now pass as a native speaker over the phone. So... don't listen to that guy. Pinyin is great.

imjustsaying 10y ago

For some reason I can't edit my old posts, so I'm making a new one. But after further investigation I'd like to point out that in Zhuyin, just because there's two vowel-containing symbols, it doesn't necessarily mean there's two vowels. And the more I think about it, the more it does seem there's one syllable. And if /zhun/ does have two syllables, it would seem to be fairly unique. I've asked a Chinese speaker about syllables before, and they didn't understand what I was trying to say. So if a Chinese speaker could chime in on this, it would be much appreciated, because I've been trying to get concise information on this for a while, and I probably shouldn't be telling the internets that it's two syllables if it's actually one.