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>'shi4' but isn't that when you use context around the word to know what the meaning is? The same happens in English...you don't always know without context.
by jason_slack 8y ago
>'shi4'
but isn't that when you use context around the word to know what the meaning is? The same happens in English...you don't always know without context.
学习中文很有趣！
Xuéxí zhōngwén hěn yǒuqù!
hanzi or pinyin reading either way I know what this is intended to say.
- smallnamespace 8y agoExcept Mandarin has a lot more homophones than English does, likely under the long influence of the writing system. For spoken Mandarin, you can probably infer enough from the conversational context, but for official documents, business and technical terminology, or any literature, full romanization renders the text much less incomprehensible. This isn't helped by the fact that Classical Chinese, from which most complex vocabulary is derived, is even more homophonic than daily speech.
- simplify 8y agoThat's just spoken language. There are many words that are "literary", which means they are used primarily in writing and not spoken language. Without hanzi it would be very difficult to understand what is written.
- jason_slack 8y agoYup this can be true. If you read something like duo(3) it could be a measure word for flowers (朵) or maybe mean “to hide or avoid” (躲)
- Lfwinster 8y agototally agree with other two comments, tbh, nobody uses pinyin anymore after grade six, it is really just a stepping stone for kids to learn chinese before they can memorize all the common characters help them to read. As a Chinese i actually hate pinin as an adult because my name would appear in Pinin on my passport and it loses all its meaning.
- jason_slack 8y agoYeah I follow you. Pinyin helped me learn tones and reading. But now I can look at a character and find the radical. Then could the remaining strokes and look it up in a paper dictionary. I have the books school children buy in china and yeah 7+ it’s just characters.