Thiron:
So, uh, if the chineese names sound completely different than the way they're written...
Why the hell are they romanized like that? Who the hell thought it's a good idea to write "TS" sound as "Q" or "SH" sound as "X"?
Even knowing it's different, I can only read english letters in english sentences in the way english language is supposed to sound...
Though pinyin, the standard romanization scheme for Mandarin, is not perfect, I don't think there is any possible way to properly romanize Chinese in a completely elegant and intuitive way while also accurately expressing and differentiating all the sounds of Chinese.
Unless Japanese's relatively simple soundset, Mandarin Chinese has many more sounds (both consonants and vowels), meaning any Chinese romanization scheme has the unwieldy task of representing more sounds than there are letters in the alphabet. An older scheme called Wade-Giles was arguably easier for a foreign person who is reading it for the first time to pronounce things closer to how they are supposed to be pronounced. However, it made use of weird letter combinations such as "hs" and also added apostrophes and umlauts to some letters to differentiate between different sounds. And the problem is that the apostrophes and umlauts would commonly be dropped (hard to type, laziness), in which case you cannot tell which sound it was meant to be.
So I personally prefer pinyin's simplicity and conciseness. Yes, you have to learn a few "weird" things, such as j -> j (sorta), q -> ch (sorta), x -> sh (sorta), zh -> j (but different from j), z -> dz (different from j), c -> ts (different from q). And 3 "shorthands": iu -> iou, un -> uen, ui -> uei. But once you know them, I find pinyin fairly efficient and concise.
last edited at Jun 4, 2015 9:36PM
