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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
by 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 agoI'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?