UTF-16
UTF-16
Posted Mar 26, 2010 15:37 UTC (Fri) by chuckles (guest, #41964)In reply to: UTF-16 by paulj
Parent article: Resetting PHP 6
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.
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.
Posted Mar 26, 2010 21:24 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
And yes they are. Shame there's much misunderstanding (in both directions)
UTF-16
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).
though. Anyway, OT.. ;)