I just heard a radio news announcer say “In Beijing… uh, Bei zhing …” My wife gets nervous when I swear at the radio, so I’ll say it here: there is no /zh/ sound in Mandarin Chinese! Why on earth do people insist on looking at a pinyin j , which is pronounced pretty much exactly like an English j , and reading it as if it were French? Stop it, all of you, just stop it!
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I was thinking about this the other day and while your prinicple may be correct, in practice I do not agree. My learning style demands written examples of spoken. Yes I could learn by vocal immersion only but it would take me far longer than if I had written text to accompany.
I’ve never come across someone who learned English as a second language who considered it a difficult language to learn. Surely, it depends on what your first language is and my experience is mostly with people speaking other European languages, but, in my experience, the people saying that English is difficult to learn are monolingual English speakers. Sure the writing system is inconsistent which must be annoying. But all languages have weird difficult things about them, and that is insignificant compared to a complicated conjugation system or a case system.
So… to be a pedant and also add more in general… they do use the symbol zh in pinyin, but that isn’t what it sounds like. The closest Mandarin approximation to the sound I often hear people use when saying Beijing would be closest to the pinyin r.
For an English transliteration of the j sound, it may be closer to a “dj.”
Sounds like you had a nearly identical experience. Working with engineers, check. Noting that pronunciation is linked to word origin, check. Realizing you have been doing this unconsciously, check. It was like discovering you had a hidden talent.
Yeah, that was my immediate response, too. Which makes sense, as that was a time when spelling and pronunciation largely matched, and after which much of the discrepancy in the two developed. So I’d think that, to some degree, one can’t help but recreate, even accidentally, a certain amount of Middle English pronunciations, just by the act of being consistent.
That explains the linguistically incoherent roots for things, and why we have so many duplicate words for things (like, for example, different words for an animal and the animal as meat - thanks to the Saxon/Norman class division). Weird spelling, a little less so - after all, so much of the weird spelling/pronunciation issues happened after all those language influences had smashed together to form English. I’m not sure how much of that can be traced to English speakers settling on pronunciations that favored one of those influences long after that point.
Fair enough. Most of my experience has been in non-Anglophone places that where American culture is quite present. Maybe that exposure makes it easier for people to pick up English.
I didn’t say it was perfect, but generally speaking you have more success parsing out a word when compared to English. The other goofy thing in Spanish is the silent H that shows up occasionally, there’s also a small to no difference between LL and Y pronunciations.
I’m currently teaching Public Speaking to mostly-Chinese students and they get a lecture kind of like this, on why English is so weird. I might need to use this video for them.
