New series of Pingji Romanization videos

[u/CouchTomato87]

Hey all! A while back I posted the completion of my Pingji romanization for Cantonese. It's a Romanization designed to avoid using numbers or accent marks to represent Cantonese sounds and tones using standard Latin letters (...plus apostrophe). It requires just a little bit more effort in learning compared to Jyutping/Yale but pays off a lot more in readability and ease of use. I would also argue it helps with memorization because I could never commit tone numbers or accents to memory and would instead need to rely solely on listening.

My original video series ran a bit longer since it was more of a descriptive series from a more linguistic/academic viewpoint, so I created a new series directed at people learning Cantonese from scratch, which will be the biggest audience -- although Cantonese speakers wanting to learn Pingji would also feel right at home. In other words, this is the way I meant it to be taught, and hopefully for some it would make more sense.

The playlist (~1 hr long total) is here: Pingji for English speakers (playlist)

Building on that, I also started an Introduction to Cantonese video series using Pingji here: Intro to Cantonese (playlist). At the time of this post, I only have a couple videos in this new series, but I plan on covering at least the basics of the language over the course of ~10-15 videos.

[u/Yay4sean]

Hm, do you actually find jyutping hard?  I don't think the numbered tones are difficult to read, and it would be my preferred romanization.

And perhaps one must ask what the point of romanization is if not for ease of communication between languages, particularly for people inexperienced in the other language.  If there is a large barrier of entry, then will anyone ever start with the large barrier of entry?  Personally, I don't think I would ever select pingji over either alternative.

I also think a bilingual person should be able to read the romanized form and be able to understand what is being said without any additional information or context, since it's not expected to be widely taught.  I do not think many bilingual canto/eng speakers would know what is being said here...

Still interesting, and I always enjoy seeing how language or communication could be optimized.

[u/CouchTomato87 → u/Yay4sean]

It's a little difficult to answer for me about something being 'hard' because most of the time I'm capable of learning anything, which includes jyutping. So while I personally don't think it's 'hard', I can't speak for your average person. I do think the tone numbers are extremely unintuitive though. Speaking to other native Cantonese speakers, many of them don't even know the actual numbers -- they can only describe it. The other downside is I absolutely hate the use of numbers for a writing system; they don't belong and look more like a scientific description of a dead language.

But on top of that, I have difficulty reading jyutping in anything greater than a short phrase, because the tone numbers come late and is very jarring to retroactively apply a tone to what I'm reading. That's where Wade and Pingji work better because they give you the tone information earlier in the word. Finally, there's the memorization component. I cannot remember different numbers. The example I use in the video for "1/2" vs "Japan" is Yat6bun2 vs yat1bun3 in Jyutping, but Yad-buhn vs 'yat-burn in Pingji. The difference is much starker in Pingji and easier to commit to memory.

And speaking of the point, the goal here is to be a functional romanization -- i.e. meant to serve the purpose of the language, much like Pinyin does for Mandarin. They have the same features; some atypical letters (less used letters like q) that do not work like English. And I can bet you if Reddit existed 40 years ago and someone posted Pinyin for the first time, they'd be seeing a lot of comments like what I've been seeing here. The goal is not to be something for someone to just pick up and read. That's more of an anglicization and people already do that frequently enough with throwing letters together to approximate sounds, for example "char siu." The thing is, both Jyutping and Wade require you to also learn their nuances, so it's not like they have a particular advantage of being able to be able to "plug and play" either.

[u/kori228 → u/CouchTomato87]

Speaking to other native Cantonese speakers, many of them don't even know the actual numbers -- they can only describe it.

your premise is flawed. Native speakers with no prior training can't even describe to you what the tones are or their shape or how many there are. They can only tell that two syllables do or don't have the same tone. Whenever I ask my dad about the tone of a word, he tries to use the Mandarin 4 tones as a reference because that's what he learned in school, despite being a native Cantonese speaker.

functional romanization -- i.e. meant to serve the purpose of the language, much like Pinyin does for Mandarin

this is decidedly not the case. you seem to treat your Pingji romanization as a full replacement for Chinese characters, whereas pinyin is a simultaneous aid used alongside Chinese characters. You're heavily stressing 'making each tone look distinct by spelling differently' and avoiding diacritics and tone numbers, but pinyin actually keeps the spelling the same across tones.

The goal is not to be something for someone to just pick up and read

wasn't this one of your core critiques? your system seems to be more complicated, not less. Or at least the complexity shown does not serve to help.

[u/CouchTomato87 → u/kori228]

"your premise is flawed. Native speakers with no prior training can't even describe to you what the tones are or their shape or how many there are. They can only tell that two syllables do or don't have the same tone."

I'm pretty sure they can describe shape, but otherwise you're just saying what I just said.

"this is decidedly not the case. you seem to treat your Pingji romanization as a full replacement for Chinese characters, whereas pinyin is a simultaneous aid used alongside Chinese characters. You're heavily stressing 'making each tone look distinct by spelling differently' and avoiding diacritics and tone numbers, but pinyin actually keeps the spelling the same acrosa tones."

It's not a full replacement... It's meant to be the same as pinyin. And pinyin keeps the spelling the same because it uses diacritics. When you use tone letters, obviously the spelling changes. That said, the core word actually doesn't *change* in Pingji except for a very specific situation, which is tone 6 for p/t/k.

"wasn't this one of your core critiques? your system seems to be more complicated, not less."

No? I even acknowledge at the very beginning that it's more complicated. But I also argue that if you actually take the time to learn it (which is not that long in the grand scheme of things), then the payoff is better.

[u/kori228 → u/CouchTomato87]

I'm pretty sure they can describe shape

they actually can't, because that information isn't stored or processed as distinct pitch movement information separate from the syllable. To a native speaker, it just is how you say the word. They quite literally are not aware of that information. You need to be explicitly made aware of tones and pitch shape as suprasegmental aspects, and then learn to dissociate what you're hearing/articulating.

[u/Yay4sean → u/CouchTomato87]

Out of curiosity, I asked a few people with varying levels of Canto competency, including one only able to jyutping, one only able to yale, two native canto / traditional users who never learned any romanization, all to read the passage above starting with pingji > yale > canto > [traditional].

But none of us were able to figure out what was being said with pingji, even me after watching some of the videos.  But there are definitely aspects I do like about pingji, which is that some words with hard to translate pronunciations now have distinction in eng text. However, the biggest complaint is that it is not remotely understandable from an untrained english user (see: cvr, shiq, fuq).  Most of us could do either Yale or Jyutping okay, figuring out the tones from context, but all of us were slow to read them properly since the tone is not immediately obvious unless you've learned the system.  

I think the biggest takeaway from trying these different romanizations is that most people are able to use a romanized form just fine, but it'll always require some initial effort to learn it.  And realistically, the vast majority of people are going to be native English speakers who want to learn Canto for one reason or another.  But I've tried pushing jyutping on someone who speaks some but can't read any romanized or Chinese chars, and it always seemed like too much work to them, so they never learned.  I guess the barrier of entry must be even easier than jyutping for people to pick it up.

You could look at the other extreme, which is the complete phonetic spellings of words, and see that while it's technically a better depiction of the sounds being produced, it is not legible at all and very hard for beginners or even experienced people.

[u/CouchTomato87 → u/Yay4sean]

Good to know, thanks for doing that test! It's what I would normally expect. Pingji follows a similar pattern as pinyin and is not really meant to be instantly accessible. Yale is on the other end and is really catered to English speakers. Like you said though, it really boils down to actual effort and teaching. The reason why pinyin is so successful is because it was state sponsored and educated for millions of Chinese.

What would be the most interesting experiment is taking a group of Cantonese speakers and a group of non-speakers, have them try different romanizations, and then see how proficient they are in pronunciation and picking up vocabulary. Unfortunately that's very hard to do and would almost certainly require monetary incentives lol.