Dali: Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us and describing it so well.
You enlightened me about how to type in Chinese by using Pinyin on a computer. Then, I read more about it on Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia, all children in mainland China are required to learn Pinyin in school. Pinyin is in fact very popular over there. If people do not speak Chinese, they are not able to use Pinyin. They will need to learn the standard Chinese pronunciation of characters before they are able to use this input method. I wonder if Deafian Chinese children have particular difficulties in using Pinyin because they are not skilled in learning the standard Chinese pronunciation of characters.
The stroke method does not require the user to know how to speak Mandarin nor to be able to recognize the characters. I think that Chinese Deafian users who use a stroke-based input method are able to construct the character from scratch as one would do in writing Chinese. However, according to Wikipedia, it is a disadvantage in that it may cause language attrition and skills loss in adults, and it may be a learning barrier for children asconcerns written Chinese.
Best regards,
André
Hello dear André! Before starting to use computers to type Chinese, it was thought that it would not work because Chinese is not letters but symbols! But they found out two basic ways to type Chinese on computer. The first one is by using Chinese pronunciation transcription which is called "pinyin". Chinese is based on syllables, there are no single letters, which means that you cannot make up new pronunciations out of the existing ones, I will give you some examples; with the phoneme "b" you can have the following combinations: ba/bi/bu/ban/bang/beng/etc... But with the phoneme "j" you CANNOT make any of the previous pronunciations, except "ji". In all there are about 400 syllables in Chinese and it is lesser than English which
is a free language in which you can have any combination of letters (some linguistics say that in English there are about more than 65000 syllables)... You can imagine that now! Back to the writing system, and using "pinyin", in Chinese we type the pronunciation transcription and not characters themselves. The pronunciation system is a worldwide system for Chinese learning! For example, to type "bicycle" in Chinese, I need to type the pronunciation pinyin into the computer and it will show up the Chinese characters---- zì xíng chē = bicycle. That's easy, isn't it? BUT! BUT! BUT! The problem is bigger when the word to type is bisyllabic. Because the computer will show you a list of many words having the same pronunciation but with different writing forms. For example: the pronunciation "yan yuan" would have the following different characters! 演员 / 眼缘/ 盐源/ 颜渊 So in this case
you will have to click on the word you need each time you're typing! It's not boring because the computer can detect the logical words combinations in a single sentence, sometimes it might miss the point! Some other Chinese people use strike by stroke system, which looks like SW! Every Chinese character has a logical way to be written in order stroke by stroke. On computers you can find this system but it is boring, you type on the basic strokes and the computer detects the order and try to guess the character, it shows you a list of possibilities and you click on the character you want! Chinese is now written from left to write! Le 29 juil. 2015 05:06:26, SW-L automatic digest system a écrit : |