Advanced - 输入法

关于对话里面的那个台词:

这样一来，我们对自己普通话的要求不是又要大打折扣了吗？现在好多人都因为依赖电脑而淡忘了汉字的书写。以后岂不是连发音都不准了？

反而我想用拼音输入鼓励准确的发音，又保证标准的发音…不过我可能看不懂那个句子的意思…

other 2 topics that came up in my lesson today:
 第一，中国打字机。电脑以前，有人发明机械打字机，看看图片、文章。

第二，每个国家有特色的键盘，除了美国QWERTY 意外，有各种各样的布局，区别不大但很麻烦。瑞士甚至有两种、德语的和法语的。反正，每个布局的目的不是快捷打，反而是放慢。

Hello goulniky. Please let me offer you an overseas Chinese's perspective on that passage which puzzled you.

The reason why pinyin input can diminish one's mastery of 发音, is that many 华裔 are very careless about their pronunciation.

We often fail to distinguish between 平舌音／翘舌音 (non-retroflex vs retroflex sounds), and 前鼻音／后鼻音. With pinyin input methods such as ITABC, which have predictive features, it is easy to get away with not knowing the exact pinyin. So 中国 can be keyed in with the simple keystroke combination "zg". The user doesn't have to be able to distinguish between zhong1guo2 and zong1guo.

HTH. Thanks for posting in such excellent Chinese; I hope to emulate you one day, you are one of the users who inspires me and gives me something to try and work towards. Thanks for that.

Hi auntie68,

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
I didn’t know at all the “zg = 中国” thing until now. Thankfully, the Google Input Method also has the same function. Wow, you can get “日本人” by only inputting “rbr”! 今天收获很大呀，真的很感谢你！

Aiya, changye! Without this predictive function, I would be lost at sea. Btw, it works particularly well with yojijukugo (成语); try "rsrh". Even the more exotic things like "plpl" work well with ITABC. Enjoy!

噼里啪啦！劈里啪啦！They have both options!

惊天动地 (jtdd) 谢天谢地 (xtxd) 感激不尽 (gjbj)！

五笔字形：中华人民共和国 (kwwl)!!

one additional comment about 谷歌拼音输入法 (Google) is it assumes the underlying keyboard layout is US-QWERTY. 

This gets really tricky when you use other layouts such as AZERTY (法国) QWERTZ (德国) etc., thus my reference above to 各个国家的键盘布局。

@ auntie68, thanks for this. I know you have a special interest in 华裔, 但不只是华裔的问题，不少大陆的中年人对拼音也不清楚。前年去西安、郑州我发不少短信，那时候我的手机没有汉字输入法，用拼音跟朋友联系，发现了我的拼音知识比他们高、较正确!

五笔输入法确实蛮快，可是我怎么也学不会呀！

Hi goulniky,

Needless to say, pinyin is very important for foreign learners and Chinese children, but not anymore for grown-up Chinese people. Good or bad, they usually don’t care much about pinyin in daily life because they ARE native Chinese speakers. And that is just why your Chinese friends are not “proficient” in writing pinyin.

@goulniky: Thanks. I agree with changye. And a very important reason why overseas Chinese are poor at pinyin (generally), is that their pronunciation (发音) per se is wobbly, 不太标准. Their grasp of hanyu pinyin is of limited use if they don't know how to pronounce the words correctly in the first place. 

Hi auntie68,

I have a question. Do native English speakers usually pay attention to pronunciation symbols? Phonetic symbols for English are naturally very important for us non-native speakers when looking up in an English dictionary, because English pronunciations are rather arbitrary.

By the way, pinyin was originally introduced to replace Chinese characters, or probably to tentatively soothe radical advocates of Romanization of Mandarin, in 1950s. Even some prominent linguists, such as 王力, were ardent supporters of the stupid abolitionism of 汉字.

Thankfully, with the development of Chinese economy and rising nationalism, the status of Chinese characters seems to be more stable than ever. I was impressed to hear that Olympic teams entered the main stadium not in alphabetical order but in Hanzi stroke count order at 北京奥运会.

Hello. I don't dare speak for "native English speakers", but I do in fact know the "IPA" ("International Phonetic Alphabet"). However, this is not taught in Singapore schools. Here in Singapore, we are relatively fluent in English, but we don't pronounce English words correctly. It's a pity.

Btw, the primary school I attended in the UK when I was 6 - 7 years old didn't teach it either. 

Changye, I think I can answer your question on English phonetic symbols.  Native speakers don't pay any attention to them.  I learned them in elementary school and haven't used them since.  I think that all languages have these "standard" systems (e.g. Mandarin), but that local variation is enough to make them useful only to learners, not native speakers.

I agree with your last comment on retention of Chinese characters.  It would be a travesty to lose the world's oldest extant written language. (Obviously, I'm preaching to the choir here.)  

I've also heard that more mainland schools, particularly around Guangdong, have reintroduced traditional characters.

Tvan, I recently read an online article (can't remember where) stating that some Asian countries (Korea, Japan, Taiwan, HK, etc.) have setup conferences with China, to eventually phase out simplified characters and restore traditional. 

It stated that there had been too many miscommunications, misunderstandings, and errors in cultural studies, business writings, etc. in the past few decades since the simplified system was implemented.

I'm not sure how much water that holds, but it was an interesting read.  I did look at the article date and it was within the past few months.

I guess reverting back to traditional would create a whole other mess.

Auntie and tvan,

Guys, thanks a lot for your quick replies. Looks like that the destinies of “phonetic symbols” are almost the same in any countries. They are important, but not many people care about them….except for foreign learners!

＞I've also heard that more mainland schools,
＞particularly around Guangdong,
＞have reintroduced traditional characters.

Wow, it’s very interesting! If someone has further information, please let us know! Having said that, it might not necessarily be good news for school students in 广东 region. If I were them, I would just say “Come on!”

So changye, how many different yojijukugo have you done with four keystrokes since this afternoon? ;-)

Hi calkins,

The situation is a bit more complicated, and please allow me to copy and paste a comment about the issue I posted half a year ago. Conclusion, simplified characters will definitely remain.

-----------------------------------------------------------
A working group of scholars from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan have long been discussing ways to unify variant Chinese characters in those countries. Last year, they finally agreed to establish what are called “unified characters” in the near future, which are supposed to replace existing variants in a phased manner.

Most irritating thing about the news is that Korean scholars took the initiative in calling for other countries to join the project. I am sorry this is going to sound somewhat nationalistic, but I would just like to say to them, a little ashamed though, that please stay away from this issue because it is none of your business.

Ordinary Korean people usually do not read and write Chinese characters anymore, even though they half-heartedly learn one thousand and eight hundred hanzi at school, and the importance of Chinese (as well as English) is increasing in Korean society as their economy is getting more deeply involved with China than ever before.

You can hardly find Chinese characters in books and newspapers in Korea, except for some history-related or academic publications. In general, Korean people basically do not care about Chinese characters, let alone “variants”, however I must say the situations in China, Taiwan, and Japan are completely different.

As for China, at first the kingdom of hanzi joined the project in a passive manner, because China wanted to keep their simplified characters intact. But the country has recently become positive about the unification, since they think that simplified characters have been becoming a de facto standard for hanzi worldwide.

In other words, China already has confidence in holding a stable position of “简体字” around the world and do not have to fear “unification” anymore, therefore China agreed with the plan under the condition that simplified characters will keep status quo, even if their counterparts in “繁体字” are modified for standardization.

In my opinion, there is no need to unify variants in Chinese characters in every country, because hanzi themselves have a great recognizability or discriminability, and it would makes almost no difference whether or not, e.g. there are few more (or less) strokes in a Chinese character, when you discern and read them.

On the other hand, such unnecessary unification of hanzi could cause certain confusion in a writing system domestically, which means that you cannot maintain notational consistency anymore even between recent past and the near future. In a sense, a minor change might be much more troublesome than a major one.

Let me take “学” as an example. Its traditional form is “學”, and it is “学” both in “简体字” and Japanese kanji. As I wrote above, China has no intention to modify their “学”, and other countries have three choices for unification, namely (1) 学, (2) 學, (3) create a new character similar to “学” and “學”.

I think all of them are nonsense. Japanese never choose (1) “學” simply because it is too complex. And if Taiwanese people select (2) “学”, it would just mean they accept the simplification as China did two score years ago. If so, I would rather recommend that Taiwan import all the simplified characters from China. The option (3) is out of question.

I personally think that some countries should keep using traditional Chinese characters from the point of view of cultural heritage preservation. “繁体字” are not a big burden anymore in this computer and WP era. Of course, it’s completely up to the local people to decide to select which set of characters for their mother tongue.

I hope hanzi unification will not happen within my own lifetime.

Hi auntie68,

As you know, Japanese people usually don't use yojijukugo (chengyu) very much in Japanese writings, because people don't want to make themselves sound pedantic, which I think is a plausible excuse not to learn chengyu diligently.....hehe!

Very interesting changye, thanks for sharing that.  I agree with you - the unification system sounds as if it'd create more problems.

I have mixed feelings about the trad./simp. debate, but overall I think the current systems are fine.  Either way, learning hanzi is challenging (yet rewarding)!

I'm using NJ Star 廣東拚音輸入法 coz this is the only method I know, and need help as to how to make the "聯想" and "用過字提前" 功能 work, although I've already selected these 2 options but they don't seem to work. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Rich

(steandric@yahoo.com)

I'm new here :)