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UTF-16UTF-16Posted Mar 26, 2010 2:49 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341)In reply to: UTF-16 by atai Parent article: Resetting PHP 6
I have a (mainland chinese) chinese dictionary here, intended for kids,
and it is indexed by pinyin. From what I have seen of (mainland) chinese, pinyin appears to be their primary way of writing chinese (i.e. most writing these days is done electronically, and pinyin is used as the input encoding).
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UTF-16 Posted Mar 26, 2010 15:37 UTC (Fri) by chuckles (subscriber, #41964) [Link]
I'm in China right now learning Mandarin so I can comment on this. Children learn pinyin at the same time as the characters. The Pinyin is printed over the characters and is used to help with pronunciation. While dictionaries targeted towards little children and foreigners are indexed by pinyin, normal dictionaries used by adults are not. Dictionaries used by adults are indexed by the radicals.
While pinyin is nice, there are no tone markers. So you have a 1 in 5 chance (4 tones plus neutral) of getting it right. You are correct that pinyin is the input system on computers, cell phones, everything electronic, in mainland china. Taiwan has its own system. Also, Chinese are very proud people, Characters aren't going anywhere for a LONG time.
UTF-16 Posted Mar 26, 2010 21:24 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Yes, I gather formal pinyin has accents to differentiate the tones, but on a
computer you just enter the roman chars and the computer gives you an appropriate list of glyphs to pick (with arrow key or number).
And yes they are. Shame there's much misunderstanding (in both directions)
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