Pinyin

Do you know how to write the Chinese radical meaning go? 芷.

The Pinyin for this Chinese radical is zhǐ.

Let's look at the stroke order.

Zhǐ.

So what you get in the kind of cyberspace in China is a kind of a play on words, and it's a little bit satirical.

So when they say ren jue, so ren literally is how you would pronounce the word run in Chinese, like if you were to pronounce it according to the Pinyin system, right? So they do it that way because of the kind of, uh, cyberspace censoring on either, like, the kind of Chinese version of Twitter, like Weibo, or on different places where you can't really say things too explicitly.

So the word became popular as a way to bypass, on the one hand, that kind of cyberspace censoring, and on the other hand, to make a kind of satirical comment on, on the kind of tightening immigration policy.

But gradually became this kind of a thing that kind of took on a life of its own.

The a sound is, practically speaking, the same in these.

If you want to read more about these things in general, I suggest you check out my article, A Guide to Pinyin Traps and Pitfalls, which covers a lot of these things that usually tend to trip up students.

Okay, so let's move on to question number two, which is about spelling convention in pinyin again, and this time about tones.

So when we write bo and i, so that's no or not or one, such as in Bu Ke Qi or Yi Yang.

That's kind of the point because it's meant to describe pronunciation.

Whereas pinyin is not really that.

Pinyin is more like a convenient way of writing down pronunciation or spoken words in Chinese using a phonetic alphabet.

Now, to the casual viewer or listener, that might seem like the difference between those two might not be that important, but in reality, it is.

Great question.

Pinyin is basically a romanized pronunciation system for Chinese.

So instead of looking at a character like ma and having no idea how to say it, pinyin tells you it's pronounced ma.

It uses letters you already know from the English alphabet, with little accent marks above the vowels to show you the tone.

Actually, part of the way that I found out that I was dyslexic was when I was studying Chinese.

So I had studied Chinese first in the PRC, and while I was there, I struggled with some aspects of pinyin.

Pinyin, for those of you who don't know, is the romanization system used in the PRC.

There are some words in pinyin where it's very easy to reverse the letter order.

So shuo and shou.

These are s-h-u-o and s-h-o-u.

So when I was studying Chinese, I could never actually read the difference between the two.

So I would see something that in pinyin said shuo dao.

What do you think computer keyboards look like?

Well, so Pinyin is like-

I couldn't even imagine.

[laughs]

Yeah.

Pinyin is, like, the, they're trying to simplify it to be more of an alphabet.

However, that being said, there's the characters, and then there's the way that those characters were interpreted in different provinces-

Mm