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It's best not to think of Hanyu Pinyin as using "English characters" to pronounce Mandarin. It's just a mapping of the initial, medial, and final sounds onto th
by paulmooreparks 1y ago
It's best not to think of Hanyu Pinyin as using "English characters" to pronounce Mandarin. It's just a mapping of the initial, medial, and final sounds onto the Latin alphabet in a consistent way, so that once you know the mapping, you know the pronunciation right away, and more practically, you can _type_ it right away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
- recursivecaveat 1y agoI used to always think these romanization schemes were really bad, until I realized they were just not for me. The ease of sight-reading and getting the correct pronunciation for a random english speaker is not the goal. It's primarily for the convenience of users of other languages to have a systematic encoding. To make it pronunciation-friendly you would have to have to add a bunch of complexity to the mapping that would compromise its usage by the real audience.