Michael Joyner wrote:
<p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk <mailto:p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk>> wrote:
I have some sympathy with this perspective, but as one who
has tried to learn spoken Chinese through the medium of
pinyin, I know only too well that such representations
can convey at best only a vague approximation to the truth.
That is why there is audio lesson material that accompanies the book.
Well, we're getting seriously off (XeTeX)-topic
here, but just to address this one point, my Chinese
lessons were also accompanied by audio material.
Through the latter, I (and some, but not all, of my classmates)
could determine that the pronunciation of the "ren" in "renshi"
(as in "renshi ni, wo hen gao xing") was not the same as the
"ren" sound in stand-alone "ren" ("person"), but this didn't
help when we encountered a new sequence commencing "ren" since
there was no way of telling from the pinyin what actual sound
"ren" had in this context.
Had the text also had an IPA component, it would have
been extremely easy to be able to identify the correct
sound.
Philip Taylor
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