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Pinyin is Not Chinese "And to think that I learnt Chinese using ZhuYingFuHao, which is like learning another language in itself. That was tough!" The Taiwan Zhuyinfuhao, Wade-Giles, Yale romanization and since the late 70's pinyin have all been learnt by any English-speaking foreign student of Chinese since the 1950's. As of today my Nokia cell phone uses zhuyinfuhao, my Chinese language software uses pinyin, my classical dictionaries and older references use Wade-Giles and I myself use a shorthand version of Yale romanization to jot down new vocabulary. There is no "inexplicable phobia to the language" among overseas Chinese kids under the age of 13 and living in Western culture because the language, if not the spoken then surely the written, is eventually lost unless other kids speak and use the same language. Parents and grandparents have not influence enough to impress the language upon a young child because most of what the child learns comes from and with its peers. That's why we have our children attend Chinese language school on weekends; that's why by the age of 15 they've drifted away from the language and the culture. |
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Pinyin is Not Chinese "Chinese is ideogram language". Please. The written Chinese language is not ideographic, it is generally logographic, that's why the word "character" is used to describe a single word and surely most foreigners (even the Americans you love to single out) know that pinyin is not the same as Chinese characters. I also suggest you look to who "invented" pinyin and discover it was a system of romanization (just one of many, and although adopted as the international starndard to romanize Mandarin it is to many readers among the worst) drafted with the help of grammarians from Eastern Europe. The difficulty of romanization is not in denoting tones, which can actually be represented by the addition of the numeral 1, 2, 3, 4 representing the four tones behind each word (e.g. "xing2", or no numeral to represent the neutral tone) but, as becomes obvious from the example, the great number of homophones present in Mandarin. Still, most often the meaning in colloquial Mandarin can be gathered from simple context as in this sentence romanized in pinyin from the written Chinese: Ciqi de shiyong zai Tangdai geng wei puji, ciqi shao zao xunsu fazhan (瓷器的使用在唐代更为普及，瓷器烧造迅速发展). You can see I have purposely chosen a rather unusual subject to illustrate my point. Of course, understanding simply through context fails miserably if one were to romanize poetry or classical Chinese. |