Learning Mandarin in Japan and Korea
June 7, 2013 9:37 PM Subscribe
Would you happen to know about how Mandarin is learned in Japan and Korea?
How are the tones visually represented? Is learning to read Roman script a prerequisite to learn Mandarin? How was Mandarin studied before it was Romanized?
How are the tones visually represented? Is learning to read Roman script a prerequisite to learn Mandarin? How was Mandarin studied before it was Romanized?
A quick search for "Basic Chinese" in Korean (기초중국어) pulled up videos showing pinyin.
But Chinese characters are also taught using Korean pronunciation in the educational system, so I wonder if there's a way used to indicate tone with just hangeul letters.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:01 PM on June 7, 2013
But Chinese characters are also taught using Korean pronunciation in the educational system, so I wonder if there's a way used to indicate tone with just hangeul letters.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:01 PM on June 7, 2013
There are other systems of romanization - Taiwan uses 'bo po mo fo', for example, which has its own special characters used for phonetics (you can also find this in some Chinese-language children's books, written alongside the hanzi).
But reading pinyin makes a lot of sense as part of teaching Mandarin, just as another way of taking 'consonant sound' + 'vowel sound'. Even English speakers have to learn a new set of consonant + vowel sounds to associate with the pinyin (e.g., q/x/ch/c) so for non-roman-language-speakers, whether you use a roman character or some specially created character doesn't make much difference... and pretty much everyone is familiar with the roman alphabet.
posted by Lady Li at 12:08 AM on June 8, 2013
But reading pinyin makes a lot of sense as part of teaching Mandarin, just as another way of taking 'consonant sound' + 'vowel sound'. Even English speakers have to learn a new set of consonant + vowel sounds to associate with the pinyin (e.g., q/x/ch/c) so for non-roman-language-speakers, whether you use a roman character or some specially created character doesn't make much difference... and pretty much everyone is familiar with the roman alphabet.
posted by Lady Li at 12:08 AM on June 8, 2013
Best answer: In contemporary Japan, basically everyone uses pinyin. I'm not saying there aren't any holdouts still clinging to Wade-Giles, or Taiwan-affiliated institutes using bopomofo, or phrasebooks for travelers that only have kana, but most people in Japan who learn Mandarin want to use it on an ongoing basis in mainland China, so adopting mainland China's preferred system makes the most sense.
How are the tones visually represented?
Initially probably using the standard "four wavy lines in a box" graphic, and then with diacritics.
Is learning to read Roman script a prerequisite to learn Mandarin?
Yes, but pretty much everyone learns it in school anyway.
How was Mandarin studied before it was Romanized?
This is a broad question, so I'm going to completely ignore some aspects of it (e.g. the practice of taking written Chinese texts and pronouncing them as a "Japanese enough" sentence). There wasn't any real standardization historically — different temples, etc. had their own systems, often kept more or less secret, but generally it was some combination of kana (more or less corresponding to vowels and consonants) and dots or other marks written around the characters to indicate tone (and/or grammatical role, etc.). Here is a brief description of one such system, an excerpt from Sasaki Isamu's Chōshō-Bon-Mōgyū: On the Tonal System of the Chinese Characters in the Mid-Heian:
Or here's a book from 1926 with a system based on similar principles but different particulars.
On the other hand, even back then (from at least the 20th century onwards) there were also books using the European-style techniques: Romanization/IPA for consonants/vowels and diacritics for tones, either in systems devised by the authors themselves or borrowed from European works on Chinese.
posted by No-sword at 1:07 AM on June 8, 2013 [5 favorites]
How are the tones visually represented?
Initially probably using the standard "four wavy lines in a box" graphic, and then with diacritics.
Is learning to read Roman script a prerequisite to learn Mandarin?
Yes, but pretty much everyone learns it in school anyway.
How was Mandarin studied before it was Romanized?
This is a broad question, so I'm going to completely ignore some aspects of it (e.g. the practice of taking written Chinese texts and pronouncing them as a "Japanese enough" sentence). There wasn't any real standardization historically — different temples, etc. had their own systems, often kept more or less secret, but generally it was some combination of kana (more or less corresponding to vowels and consonants) and dots or other marks written around the characters to indicate tone (and/or grammatical role, etc.). Here is a brief description of one such system, an excerpt from Sasaki Isamu's Chōshō-Bon-Mōgyū: On the Tonal System of the Chinese Characters in the Mid-Heian:
[... T]here are two kinds of guiding marks put beside the Chinese characters: red dots and black kana letters. The red dots representing tones seem to have been put in at the same time as the Chinese characters. It is recorded in the copy, however, that the black kana letters representing sounds were added in the third year of Chōs[h]ō, the end of the Heian Era. Today, therefore, the manuscript copy is called Chōshō-Bon-Mōgyū. [...] The purpose of this paper is to show that the red dots are in accord with the eight-tone system, which can be traced to the nine-tone system.Dots around the characters for tones remained popular into modern times. Here is a book from 1889 for self-study of Chinese: you can see at the bottom of the page it shows that each of the four tones is represented with a dot in a different corner. Above, there are descriptions, e.g. 上聲ハ聲の上リテ猛烈ナルモノナリ "上聲 [third tone]: the voice rises violently." (Note that some of the names of the tones aren't the ones used today — I don't know how much to read into that, whether they're based on a different Chinese tradition or just made up by this author.) Starting on page 5, you can see examples of the system in action.
Or here's a book from 1926 with a system based on similar principles but different particulars.
On the other hand, even back then (from at least the 20th century onwards) there were also books using the European-style techniques: Romanization/IPA for consonants/vowels and diacritics for tones, either in systems devised by the authors themselves or borrowed from European works on Chinese.
posted by No-sword at 1:07 AM on June 8, 2013 [5 favorites]
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A few years later I tried to take up Mandarin with a study group in Japan (all Japanese folks), and I think it was the same way. I failed miserably.
Here's a Japanese Wikipedia page for "alveolar consonants" in Mandarin.
Here's an extremely convoluted way to learn different tones by assigning symbols to them (scroll down the page for a table).
Here's the first page of Google results for "study Chinese".
posted by KokuRyu at 9:59 PM on June 7, 2013