phonemic

why dont we use phonemic,it would be much easier to learn to speak if the pronounciation is right there in the word itself...eg. hao is pronounced how...so use..nee how ma...I know its not orthodox pinyin but english people would learn to speak mandarin much faster, which is what we really want right?\nAlso if the english is placed under the pinyin in the lesson we could see what the translation is immediately...\nwhat do yu think??\nthks\nmike\n[redacted]

Pinyin was partially created in order to help standardize the translation into Roman alphabets. Although it has some quirks （maybe Lin could say more) it represents the sounds well. In 'ni hao ma' the letter 'i' is actually an 'ee' sound in more languages than not. Hao & how actually aren't even the same sound. The 'w' sound is a voiced bilabial glide i.e. your lips have to touch -- in Hao 好 they do not, and we only have two vowels together. According to the International Phonetic Alphabet the pinyin spelling reflects the pronunciation perfectly.

Ni hao! Thanks for your posts. Oggiedoggy, you've got it. Pinyin does reflect the pronunciation using sounds that occur across languages. The IPA is a great thing to bring up as 'i' really does sound like 'eee' in English. I won't go too much into detail about it, but this is the reason that the pinyin is the way it is. As for having the English and Pinyin on the same page at the same time, I will pass the feedback onto our tech support team to see what they think. We do not have it this way at the moment so people who don't want to see the English to really test themselves can. I would suggest printing out the transcripts of the conversations so you can see them both at the same time if this helps you. Best of luck with your Chinese learning to both of you! :)

Thisn is exactly why Cantonese will die out as a language. Simply because there is NO standard "pin yin:" to help people learn it. Also who is to say your how is the samer as my how? For example I am from the north of England so Book is pronouned Boooook long oooh sound whereas in other places it sounds more like Buck as in US dollar. Please one thing the Chinese did right was to establish a standardisation throughout the world. I tried to lean Korean the way you suggested . It was impossible due tot he fact that Koreans don't know which English to use and also Spanish etc No please please don't even think about it. Re Chinese and Pin Yin on same page. As I said in another post, I copy and paste the Chinese characters into a word document then use ruby text for the pin yin. In other words I don't use the RC pin yin. That way each chinese characrter has it own "tied" pin yin above it. (I think also in other free word processors) Howard