I know I’m supposed to write in Chinese in this forum, but I’m just not there yet. I’d like to know how many people who are learning Chinese studied bopomofo, so if you did, would you please leave a comment and let me know how it worked for you? Thanks :-).
just get on to it. and get it over with. it will do you a lot of good.
I’m not sure that I understand what you’re saying at all.
I always use pinyin to write Mandarin, although I know it’s more efficient (once you’ve had practise) to use zhuyin 注音 (the proper name for bopomofo). I bought some keyboard stickers when I was in Taiwan for a little more than US$1, which have the zhuyin characters on as if it were a Taiwanese keyboard. It’s a little daunting to learn how to use it, that’s why I haven’t yet. I tried learning the same way I did with Japanese kana (get a flashcard-like program, type or spell the character it requests), but whereas Japanese kana I learnt in about two days, zhuyin was not so easy, one of the reasons being some characters resemble closely or are the same as Japanese kana, yet with different sounds, or because the programs I found to help with zhuyin weren’t so good. That said, I could’ve put a lot more effort in, considering I have no worries about learning new hanzi everyday, haha!
I have no idea why anyone would want to learn bopomofo. I think it would just slow you down. I learned Chinese using the old Wade-Giles system and then switched over to pinyin. These are based on something we know, the Latin alphabet and therefore require little time to learn.
In any event, we need to rely on our ears to identify the sounds of Chinese, and there are not so many of them. The transliteration is just something that helps us along. It is not worth spending time learning a whole different system, in my view.
To me and everyone I know in China, bopomofo is another name for pinyin.
Wow! No! It’s totally different. They’re little character-like things that have sounds that you put together to make characters. Check out this wiki page for a full explanation. Bopomofo - Wikipedia
“The same sequence (bopomofo) is used by other speakers of Chinese to refer to other phonetic systems. For example, it is a colloquial name for Hanyu pinyin in mainland China.”
Zhuyin fuhao (Chinese: 注音符號; pinyin: Zhùyīn fúhào; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ; literally “phonetic symbols”), often abbreviated as zhuyin and colloquially called bopomofo,[1] is a phonetic system for transcribing Chinese, especially Mandarin. It was introduced in the 1910s.
To most people outside of mainland China it refers to this system (above) whereas pinyin refers to the transliteration system developed in China.
I understand your point, but I was not referring to the mainland usage. I was referring to ㄅㄆㄇBoPoMo發音練習-財團法人國語日報社 not http://www.chinese-tools.com/learn/chinese/01-phonetics-hello.html. Although, they both start off with the same initial four sounds, so I can see why it’s used to refer to both pinyin and zhuyin. However, when I wrote this question, I was referring to zhuyin.
@Troi Thanks for your input, but I meant zhuyin all along, I just didn’t know that was the correct terminology until I encountered the wiki article, and it has been some time since I first wrote this question.