This certainly isn’t the first time that Chinese characters have been used as a guide for pronunciation of English words, but it’s the most recent example I’ve seen, related to Shanghai’s World Expo. Here’s the “世博双语指南” (World Expo Bilingual Guide):
And here’s a text transcription of the content:
欢迎光临
welcome to our store! (维尔抗姆突奥窝思道)早上好！下午好！晚上好！
Good morning! (古的猫宁)
Good afternoon! (古的阿夫特怒)
Good
…
You may have heard of Sa Dingding before. Shanghaiist wrote about her a long time ago, and fans of “world music” will have known about her for quite some time. As I understand it, she’s only recently been catching on in China in a big way, which is how I was introduced to her music by a Chinese friend.
From her Last.fm page:
Sa Dingding is a singer and musician born in Inner Mongolia.
…
This is a screenshot from the Google Pinyin installer:
If you’re learning Mandarin for real, sooner or later you’re going to need to experience the rich variety in pronunciation that Greater China has to offer. This simple “fuzzy pinyin” options screen gives you an idea of what’s out there. (Speakers that can’t differentiate between z/zh, r/l, f/h, etc. typically can’t properly type the pinyin for the words that contain those sounds in standard Mandarin, so fuzzy pinyin…
My friend Mark has created a FireFox addon. It does one thing and it does it well: it converts onscreen text from numeral pinyin to pretty pinyin with tone marks. (It doesn’t convert characters to pinyin or any of that jazz.)
I find this very useful. If it sounds good to you, try out the Pinyin Input Firefox Extension.
John has lived in China for
9.9
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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