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Comment by yichi | Hacker News Reader

I'm against Pinyin for the same reason as why I'm against using Romaji for learning Japanese. Pinyin and Romaji uses latin alphabet for representing sounds in a foreign language and if you are a native English speaker like most of us on HN, it's really bad because your brain will try to associate your knowledge of English with Pinyin you are reading. If you use Zhuyin for Chinese, or the Kana system for Japanese, you are telling your brain to start learning the phonetic system from scratch, which makes learning Chinese or Japanese a lot easier phonetically at least.

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Except that if you use a western keyboard you still need to learn Pinyin or Romaji in order to be able to type the language. In my own attempts to learn a little bit of Japanese I've noticed that it is indeed difficult to associate the 'new' characters to the correct sound without using Romaji as an intermediate representation but my hope is that the more I learn and interact with the language the less this is the case. I think that, especially when using online learning tools, learning Romaji is inevitable and don't think that learning the phonetic system 'from scratch' makes it easier (if it is even possible to completely forget about your own phonetic/alphabetic system).

In short, as a starting learner of Japanese I acknowledge that the problem you describe exists but think that 'really bad' is an overstatement and it is almost inevitable that your brain associates your old knowledge of English (or other languages) to the new language.

>"Except that if you use a western keyboard you still need to learn Pinyin or Romaji in order to be able to type the language."

No you don't. I type in zhuyin every day. The sounds line up in order of the alphabet, starting with ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, in the left column. It's actually easier than touch typing English.

As someone who only knows English, and is learning Mandarin / Traditional Chinese. I agree that Zhuyin is easier than Pinyin.

So you have a zhuyin keyboard and is suggesting everyone to buy one in order to type Chinese?

No. That's wrong on both counts. Please re-read my comment.

I read your comment 5 times and still do not understand it.

The standard zhuyin input is laid out on the keyboard in order. By in order, I mean it is in the same order as the sounds have been taught for many generations and still are today (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlNGJzYJQDI).

It would be like if English speakers didn't use "qwerty" keyboards but instead used "abcde" keyboards. Touch typing would be far easier to learn. My computer doesn't have zhuyin printed on the keyboard, since I bought it in California, but I type zhuyin on it every day. Even before I could touch type, it was easy because it was in order.

I learned Chinese in Taiwan with Zhuyin, as a child. The first thing the teachers got was instruction in Zhuyin, and the way our books and teachers taught Zhuyin was by giving latin characters and English words with corresponding letters. Just looking at Zhuyin did not tell my English-trained brain I was learning new sounds from scratch.

In college I was taught Pinyin and we were given instruction on the correct pronunciation of each phonetic sound, positioning of the tongue etc., and the teacher spent time drilling us on that.

What matters is good instruction. Using Romanization doesn't encourage more correct pronunciation. Roman and Cyrillic alphabets are used for all manner of languages with completely different phonologies.

Honestly, once you know either pinyin or zhuyin, learning the other is trivial. It took under a day for me to get it 95% down and then with some regular usage it was done. But one effect was I found I had a much easier time keeping sounds straight than my fellow learners who often confused sounds that had less straight-forward mappings in the system they learned.

Learning IPA on top is an extreme but still useful third point of attack and again, it's trivial compared to the difficulty of actually learning to hear the sounds clearly. It must have been a year before I realized how different the d in pinyin and the d in English were.

Are you opposed to using it as a learning device to help bootstrap? Or are you referring more to its long-term, continued use? Or its use at all?

I'm opposed to using it for beginners who aren't familiar with the phonetic system of the language. Once you learned the phonetic system properly, and you know the character's in Romaji and Pinyin don't represent the sound you know in English, of course it's then helpful for learning how to type Japanese or Chinese.

Don't get me wrong, Romaji has useful purposes, such as representing place names in Japan for foreigners, etc. But as a learning device for learning Japanese, it's not a very good one.

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