/lit/ - Literature

>>4540592
O sin duda. I've just started taking Japanese classes casually and not only are the phonetics a piece of cake, I already know all of the kanji that we've been exposed to and more. Benefits of common history in the writing.

The "TS" consonant from Wade-Giles is actually not an inaccurate rendering of the "C" of pinyin. That "C" sound very much like the "ts" at the end of "cats". Now, growing accustomed to using that consonant at the beginning of words, instead of at the end, is what will give you fits at first. But that's how Chinese goes.

This is a good look. It explains some of the changes in Chinese phonetics in the past 200-300 years and speculates why some of the old transliterations were different (and seem to us so terrible).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology

Modern Mandarin, being a standardization of Beijing kouyin and amalgamation of elements from dialects elsewhere, is a synthetic hodgepodge, and accordingly doesn't always reflect pronunciation depending on the region of the country that you visit. But standard education has been a fixture of mainland life for so long now that you rarely, outside of very remote areas, encounter folks who can't understand your schoolbook mandarin, because even if they speak dialect, they learned a similar Mandarin in school.

That said, I still think Wade-Giles is shit. I mean, come on. Wade was a Brit soldier who literally was part of an invasion in China. Even if he didn't have a jingoist attitude, which I surmise from what little of his writings i have read that he did, then I don't think that he was the most qualified to put out a good transliteration system. And in fact, he didn't, which was why Giles had to edit it so much. Even so, it is undoubtedly inferior to pinyin. Pinyin simply makes more sense in its understanding of English phonetics, let alone Chinese.

Haven't studied Wu, and if I'm realistic with myself, I likely won't. I've taken two years of Cantonese courses targeted to people who already speak Mandarin, but the focus there was on colloquial Canto. To be honest, that's more what I want out of Cantonese, anyway. It's such a chatty language. Mandarin is undoubtedly the better language to focus on for literature and classical studies, because, though the phonetics may be different, the meaning of characters and the literary tradition are much more closely related to classical Chinese in Mandarin than they are in any of the other languages in the sub-family.

Oh, and the Q
Q
Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth (it's an alveolo-palatal consonant) and blow air from your mouth (not your throat). Should sound like a VERY light "ch" of sorts. That's another one for which you should seek out recordings. Again, I'll refer you to MDBG.

MDBG
Better dictionary for looking up chengyu, and classical meanings of characters alongside modern meanings. Also parses phrases for you properly so you can put in a block of text and it will put...