Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Discussions on Mandarin Chinese. Do not post requests for translations or advertise couses in this forum.
Zhongguoren

Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by Zhongguoren »

Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

You waiguoren wen: tade Yingwen mingzi "Ben" zenyang fanyi wei Hanzi. Wo shuo: Lianheguo tichang ren-diming he wailaiyu yong tong3yi1 de Roma zimu, yi3 fangbian guo2ji4 jiaoliu. Ruguo ying4yao4 fanyi jiushi "Ben4".

Zhongguoren ying4yao4 ba "Bush" fanyi wei "Bu4xi1"/"Bu4shu1", "SARS" fanyi wei "sa4si1"/"sha1shi4" ye-shi ben4.
scottie

Re: Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by scottie »

hi, can u type them in chinese character?
Juju

Re: Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by Juju »

看拼音很累啊
Zhongguoren

Re: Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by Zhongguoren »

Yinwei nide Pinyin shuiping di.
Dylan Sung

Re: Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by Dylan Sung »

Actually, true pinyin should include the tones, not numbers, but actual tone marks.

Dyl.
Hanzi Wensheng

Re: Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by Hanzi Wensheng »

So just how exactly is translating non-Chinese names of people and places into Chinese "ben"? When you're speaking or writing Chinese, why should you switch to English just to say or write a certain non-Chinese person or place's name? It's much easier and smoother if you just stick to one language, otherwise you'd sound like you're speaking "Chinglish". Besides, do you think non-Chinese speakers speak or write Chinese names in Chinese? Most of the time, they can write in Pinyin (which isn't true Chinese at all) but they usually pronounce the words with the "American accent". For example, the word "wang" would be pronounced like "wayne". I would say that's just as different, if not much more than, as Bush and Buxi.

Also, it isn't very nice to insult someone's Pinyin skills just because they prefer to read Hanzi. The Chinese language has been written with Hanzi for four thousand years, who are you to say that everyone should be experts at Pinyin. Besides, how often do people actually get to read this much Pinyin all together? When you go to a bookstore do you see books printed with Hanzi or Pinyin? Have some common sense please.

You call yourself Zhongguoren? You're dragging the name through the mud. You should change your handle to "Hanjian".
Dylan Sung

Re: Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by Dylan Sung »

One of the strongest evidence that a switch from hanzi type characters to a romanisation could work is the experience of Vietnam's use of Quoc Ngu. However, one thing which it did do, was to sever modern users of Quoc Ngu from the historical documents of their past written in characters.

However, for my own personal point of view, I would prefer HYPY to stay as an auxilliary system of phonetic indication as a learning aid for learning hanzi. It would allow the student or user to still use hanzi and stay in touch with its past literary history, and be aware of a national or international common standard of pronunciation.

Dyl.
Hanzi Wensheng

Re: Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by Hanzi Wensheng »

The Vietnamese romanization system isn't as successful as most people tend to think. Like Chinese, there are many words with the same pronounciation in the Vietnamese language. Therefore, when you ask a Vietnamese person what a certain word means, he or she would usually answer that with asking how you would use it in a sentence. It's like asking someone who speaks Mandarin what the word "ma" means. Even if you add the tones, the narrow-downed list is still quite long.

This problem also exists in the Korean language and its usage of the Hangul writing system. This is why for a couple hundred of years, Hangul was used side by side with Hanzi (or what they call Hanja). They used Hanzi to write for the most part and the Hangul to write grammar particals in Korean, much like how Kanji and the Kanas are used in Japanese.

I agree with Dylan that Hanyu Pinyin should only be used as an auxilliary system for phoentic indication as a learning aid.

Finally, wouldn't switching from Hanzi, the writing system used by our ancestors for thousands of years, to Roman letters be like abandoning our culture and identity?
Dylan Sung

Re: Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by Dylan Sung »

North Korea has abandoned hanzi (or hanja) altogether, so its not that they can't do without it, it's just the conservatism of the old confucian scholars that has kept it in place. The main difference between Chinese and

The way Chinese has developed has tended towards a language where one sound may have many meanings, and in writing, these various meanings become differentiated by the character's appearance. Korean on the other hand has polysyllabic words which allows for greater identification of a word and tending less towards as many homophones as Chinese.

So, pinyin, without tones tend to show a greater tendency towards homphonism, and much harder to read and understand. Besides, I read Chinese characters, not in Mandarin, but my own dialect of Hakka.


Dyl.
Hanzi Wensheng

Re: Wailaiyu zenyang fanyi?

Post by Hanzi Wensheng »

The abandoning of Hanja in North Korea is similar to the Chinese Communists deciding to use Simplified Chinese rather than Traditional Chinese. Part of the Communist movement was to abandon the old and focus on "advancement" and "progress".

I never said one can't live without Hanzi. Sometimes I chat online with my Chinese-speaking friends with Pinyin because not everyone can input Chinese efficiently even if they are fluent with the language. When we chat with Pinyin, we can understand each other perfectly fine. However, one of the main advantage of Hanzi is that it gives the reader a direct and more meaningful understanding of the text. It's almost like seeing a picture of something rather than a true text description.

Also, labelling Chinese, namely Mandarin, as monosyllabic, as opposed to polysyllabic, is rather misleading. According to dictionary.com http://www.dictionary.com/ , polysyllabic means "characterized by words having more than three syllables" while monosyllabic is "characterized by or consisting of monosyllables". I don't believe any language falls completely into either category. There are many "words" or ci2 in modern Chinese that are made up of two or more characters, for example "dianshi" (television), "dianhua" (telephone), "hudie" (butterfly), "huiyishi" (meeting room), "bangongshi" (office). As a matter of fact, if you make note of the words you use during an average day, you'd find that there's a great number of words that are indeed "polysyllabic". Of course, you can also break down each of these ci2 and argue that they are made up of more "simple" words. For example, "dianshi" would be "dian" (electronic) "shi" (vision). But that would just be being picky and also if you know Latin, you'd realize that you can do the same with most English words to make them "monosyllabic", for example, "recall" with "re" and "call". As you can tell, this issue is already getting blurry and complicated.

But getting back to the issue, the Korean language borrowed a great deal of their vocabluaries from Chinese. Take their greeting for example "anh nyeong ha se yo", "anh nyeong" is "an'ning" in Chinese meaning peace while "ha se yo" is just Korean grammar partical.
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