Reader Ash (of China Car Times) points out that Times Online is doing a “learn Mandarin Chinese” feature, complete with audio.
This is cool and all, but I found their online transcript a bit disturbing. A sample from Lesson 6:
Part 1: Taking a train
Clerk Qù nâr?
Leigh Qù Xî’ân.
Clerk Jî zhâng?
Leigh Liâng zhâng.
So, first and third tones don’t need to be distinguished, and pinyin conventions for how to write tone marks can be discarded at will?
I have a feeling someone made this call because there were pinyin encoding issues when proper tones were used. Still, this is pretty bad.
Both the first tones (vowels with macrons) and the third tones (haceks) are outside the 8-bit character set; only people who care about Chinese and have some computer know-how will bother to get ti right.
You just know some editor tried to load the initially-correct content with the wrong browser or fonts and decided to make a change, gambling that the readers wouldn’t care… they could have made the transcriptions as graphics instead!
February 14th, 2007 at 2:24 amThat’s horrible! They should use my pinyin tone tool. :D
February 14th, 2007 at 5:03 amHaha. How in the world can they miss that one. (I suppose that’s probably unlikely, which would make it deliberate and all them more dumbfounding…)
February 14th, 2007 at 4:23 pmMark, computers just about everywhere support unicode, these days. The site you’re reading right now is UTF-8.
February 15th, 2007 at 12:40 amI always type pinin with numbers rather than trying to make the tone symbols themself…it’s much more convenient, for example wo3 shi4 zhong1 guo2 ren2
February 16th, 2007 at 4:33 pmoops…misspelled pin yin…better point that out first before somebody else beats me to it.
February 16th, 2007 at 4:36 pm