Chinese languages

Xianggang de xuexiao xianzai shi jiao1 Pinyin de.

lailai wrote:

> Maybe I can tell something. First, pinyin is the official roman
> systems for
> Chinese language in mainland China, while in Taiwan it is a
> different system
> called Zhuyin Fuhao. Second, Everybody in China knows pinyin,
> and every
> student learns it as early as from primary school. So there is
> no problem
> that anybody in China does not recognize pinyin. Pinyin to
> Chinese students
> is not like French or Spanish to English-speaking students. It
> is a roman
> system for the same language rather than some other languages.
>
> The last thing I have to tell you is, the pinyin system only
> represents the
> sound of the Chinese characters, which means that it lost the
> structure or
> the picture of the character itself, which is the most
> important and meaningful part of Chinese language (and also its
> culture). Also only using
> pinyin will cause a lot of ambiguities, because a pinyin word
> may represent
> several characters. That's the reason that China will never use
> pinyin as
> a replacement of the characters, as some radical people
> suggested in
> early 20th century, because it would have caused much more
> problems
> than the problems it could have solved.
>
> I am a native Chinese Mandarin speaker, and anyone interested
> in
> Chinese language or literature is welcome to contact me via
> email:
> lailai@ustc.edu

I'm interested HB