no no that's not it, he's teaching me Spanish for free and I love teaching Chinese anyway.
So, I was trying to review my Chinese and started surfing, I found interesting stuff.
This is the Taiwanese way of "spelling" out words: http://www.liwin.com/zhuyin/
Although I learned the Taiwanese way first, I didn't find it particularly effective. I prefer the Hanyu Pinyin, the Chinese way from China, which was what I learned in Singapore.
Strangly found out a lot of things I didn't know before, like how do you "spell" Grandpa in chinese?? In the Taiwanese BO PO MO, you have to do Ge Wu Eng (because "Ong" doesn't exist in Taiwanese BO PO MO), which becomes Gueng rather than Gong, but they still say gong for some reason. It just doesn't make sense......
but in Hanyu Pinyin, there's Eng and Also Ong, therefore Dream is Meng, and Grandpa is Gong.
don't know if it makes sense to you. But anyway, trust me, Hanyu Pinyin is definitly more effective, and that's what i'm using to teach Chinese....
so if you are interested, here are some information:
25 out of 26 English alphabet letters are used in Pinyin. Letter 'v' is not used, while letter ' ü ' is added to represent the vowel sound of 'yu'.
Pinyin includes consonants and vowel letters.
1. Consonant letters
There are 20 consonant letters use in Mandarin (three consonants are represented by combinations of two letters - 'zh', 'ch' and 'sh'), they are:
b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r, y, w
2. Vowel letters
There are 6 vowel letters used in Mandarin:
a, o, e, i, u, ü
3. Syllables
Syllables are composed by consonants, vowels and tone.
The consonant that begins a syllable is initial (listen to the pronunciation in mp3 format online at http://www.learn-chinese-language-online.com/chinese-pinyin-initials.html) , they can be:
b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r, y, w
The rest parts after the initial are finals. Final ( listen to the pronunciation in mp3 format online at http://www.learn-chinese-language-online.com/chinese-pinyin-finals.html ) can be a single vowel, a combination of vowels, or combination of vowels and nasals 'n' or 'ng':
There are 6 simple finals which are single vowels, they are : a, o, e, i, u, ü .
The others are compound finals, they are:
ai, ao, ou, ei, ia, ie, iao, iou, ua, uo, uai, uei, üe,
an, ang, ong, en, eng, in, ing, ian, iang, iong, uen, ueng, uan, uang, ün, üan
The combination of 21 initials and 33 finals in Mandarin romanization (there are five more finals, but they share the same symbols as other finals) form about 420 different sounds.
A word consists of initial + final + tone. In some cases, the initial can be omitted.
Although most of the sounds are generally close to how they are used and pronounced in English, some don't follow English letters exactly and are pronounced differently.
Pay extra attention to the differences and listen closely to each Chinese sound, it takes practices to pronounce correctly.
So it's pretty interesting huh? You should try listening to the sounds on the link above.
Also, here's a chart of all the sounds you can emit in Chinese, and I tell you, the list is looooong!! http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/easia/pinyin.html
Anyway, Chinese is pretty facinating...
