As I scratch the surface of Chinese, I now understand why the language cannot be simply converted to the Roman alphabet. They have to keep the ideograms, and we will never see newspapers or books written in the Romanized version of Chinese. Too bad. That would make learning the language easier.
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| This biography is supposed to be flattering. I don't know. |
Chinese does not have that many sounds. Many words are just one or two syllables. The problem is that you can have a syllable like shi which means different things in the four different tones for that syllable. But beyond that, each of those four tones may represent many different words and meanings.
One sound for 11 words
When you look in a Chinese-English dictionary for definitions for just the fourth tone of the syllable shì (the accent means falling tone) you find 11 different words with 11 different ideograms. This one sound represents city, market, vow, matter, power, family name, to be, to try and more. Neither the sound nor the Romanized written form gives you a clue to the difference. You have to see the ideogram. (Context helps, of course.)
Contrast that with English where homonyms like too, two and to are spelled differently. Or hoard, horde and whored; or palate, pallet and palette. At least in the written form, you can see that they are all different.
