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Tankies will deny that chinese are libs
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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Those are the least common letters in English and they are jarring to the eye when used often. Pinyin was developed as a romanization system for the phonemes of Mandarin. But it's a poor system. Xi doesn't sound like "she," Pinyin X is a sound English doesn't have. It's like "sh" but instead of using the tongue tip you use the tongue blade. Taiwan has Bopomofo but it's symbols like hiragana. for Romanization it uses the older Wade-Giles system which also looks alien.
Hsieh-hsieh sounds more like "thank you" than the alien xiexie.
So it's more that you aren't used to it and maybe aren't that interested in language learning to begin with? Pinyin seems like a very good and intuitive system to me, I understand the rationale behind why those specific letters make those specific sounds. But if languages aren't your forte then that's fine, it can't be everybody's thing.
When I'm autistic, which is always.
Edit: Seriously, I should cut the laconism and just say upfront that you're ascribing intent to me that's not there, which I find hurtful and upsetting. I think it's significantly more passive aggressive and toxic to be accusatory towards an autistic person who phrased an idea poorly than to be an autistic person who occasionally phrases ideas poorly. I'd rather hear "this comes across as passive-aggressive, consider changing your phrasing in these concrete ways" or even "I get that you didn't intend it, but I found this hurtful because it came across as passive aggressive to me" or even just "please clarify your intent". Those are far more productive things to say in this situation, because miscommunications happen, even miscommunications that hurt people, but if you don't go around assuming ill intent from people then I won't have to go around overthinking my every word because I apparently have to worry about strangers accusing me of being mean on purpose at the drop of a hat.
I will inevitably fail at saying the right thing every time. When something like this happens, I will remember crying when my least competent old teacher as a kid accused me of lying about not understanding my assignment when I was genuinely confused by it; then I will curse that I evidently have no safe space even online where neuronormativity doesn't force me to invest more energy into casually existing there than a neurotypical has to invest, because this sort of thing is always just around the corner. Do I need to start talking like a lawyer all the time? Like a Greek philosopher? Does everything I say need to be at least two paragraphs with citations? Should I just start speaking my personal conlang 24/7 in protest, given that people won't understand me no matter how I talk? Seriously! Ugh.
I didn't see what he said but I can imagine based on your response. As a fellow autistic person who regularly commits the sin of "incorrect tone", I feel your pain.
I took a break from Hexbear for most of today and was sort of dreading to eventually read the two messages in my inbox in case they were that jerk doubling down, but I'm glad to see that my inbox messages instead ended up being you and Edie sending me messages of support. It makes me feel better. ¡Ua yéyniyevye: e : kyerte!
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X and Q were used because they're so uncommon in English, which made them great for representing uncommon sounds. I've never seen anyone assert that X in pinyin is equal to /ʃ/, only that it's the closest sound English has.
It also makes more sense to have 1 letter per phoneme rather than "hsieh" where you have "hs" for /ɕ/, "i" for /i/, and "eh" for /ɛ/. It's a very poorly constructed system to have these superfluous Hs all over the place and "eh", in particular, is extremely anglo-coded. I can't think of a speaker of any other language using the Latin script that would put that H on the end to signify that sound to the learner, which makes for a very biased system of romanization.
Sorry, I don't IPA.
Neither does anyone else. That's why Pinyin was invented. And better yet, Bopomofo which can't be represented with the Latin letters. Xi jinping is not Whe jinpeeeng.
Nor is Beijing "bay-zheeng" as so many of its long-term foreign residents pronounce it.
???
Pinyin has no bearing on people refusing to learn proper pronunciation. When you learn Mandarin, you learn what the actual sounds are that the pinyin corresponds to. This response is incoherent.
Wait until you find out Beijing mandarin is not "standard" and Beijingers sound like they have marbles in their mouths. Made a very unpleasant acquaintance with one this evening and Culturally they're jerks as well as linguistically, not less because they're told from birth that they're right and everyone else is wrong.
Sounds like people in Tokyo. "Largest city narcissist syndrome" or something.
As for variations on pronunciation, yeah, that's true across every language. When you teach a new language to people you just have to pick (or create) a variation that will be intelligible to people who speak it natively. You can't teach the infinite variations of pronunciation, grammar, etc. in a beginner language course. You'd just confuse people.
Or New York City where people assume without explaining the whole world knows the difference between bronx brooklyn and so on. Unless you live there, who cares? And they sneer at us for being "flyover territory" because obviously the only other place that exists is LA. Imagine "standard" English was assumed to be Noo Yawk accent.
Hmmm, what's your HSK level?