Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
Tonally Orthographic Pinyin
I found out this really cool way to write Pinyin while browsing the Chinese Stack Exchange (ps. which you guys must join!). It’s called Tonally Orthographic Pinyin. Its main aim is to make tone marks redundant. The creator said this: The TOP system is redundantly marked for tones: with colors, with capital and small letters, and with the standard Hanyu Pinyin tone marks. So, where you would get “Nǐ huì shuō yīngwén ma?” in TOP [...]
Oddities in Chinese: Hanyu Pinyin Syllables
I’ve been learning Chinese for almost four years now (a few more months to go). I still discover interesting things about Mandarin everyday. I remember back in 1st year of Chinese, we went through the Pinyin chart of syllables, getting the grips of Chinese pronunciation. Syllable after syllable we went: bo, po, mo, fo etc etc. Little did I know that now three years later I’m still finding some oddities in these syllable charts and [...]
