UTF-16

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:21 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: UTF-16 by marcH
Parent article: Resetting PHP 6

As a data-point, I believe children in China are first taught pinyin (i.e.
roman alphabet encoding of mandarin), and learn hanzi logography buiding on
their knowledge of pinyin.

UTF-16

Posted Mar 25, 2010 19:33 UTC (Thu) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (3 responses)

But pinyin is not a writing system for Chinese. It helps with teaching pronunciation.

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Posted Mar 26, 2010 2:49 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

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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Posted Mar 26, 2010 15:37 UTC (Fri) by chuckles (guest, #41964) [Link] (1 responses)

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.

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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)
though. Anyway, OT.. ;)

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Posted Mar 25, 2010 20:23 UTC (Thu) by khc (guest, #45209) [Link] (3 responses)

I was raised in Hong Kong and not in mainland China, but I do have relatives in China. I've never heard that kids learn pinyin before the characters.

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Posted Mar 26, 2010 2:44 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

This is what someone who was raised in China has told me.

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Posted Mar 27, 2010 22:39 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

China has 1,325,639,982 inhabitants, according to Google. That is more than the whole of Europe, Russia, US, Canada and Australia combined. Even if there is a central government, we can assume a certain cultural diversity.

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Posted Mar 28, 2010 4:22 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Good point. :)

This was a Han chinese person from north-eastern China, i.e. someone from
the dominant cultural group in China, from the more developed part of China.
I don't know how representative their education was, but I suspect there's
at least some standardisation and uniformity.