Book uses Pinyin instead of Wade-Giles

>book uses Pinyin instead of Wade-Giles

Wade-Giles sucks

get with the times gramps

>Watching documentary on Deng Xiaoping
>English narrator
>"DANG ZYOHPEENG"

>not writing Mandarin in IPA directly

I think that is the best solution DESU

had a sinology gf once, she said that pinyin is atrocious

>nɑːtʰ juːzJŋ aJpʰieJ tʰu ɹaJtʰ ɛvɜːriθJŋ

I don't know any non-IE languages, so this might sound stupid, but what about using a Vietnamese-style Roman alphabet? They have tones and all that chink stuff (to use technical linguistics terms).

>Jiang Jieshi

>aspiration at the end of a word

pinyin is for stupid americans who dont understand aspirated and nonaspirated consonants so they just use the closest english equivalents

>he doesn't aspirate his consonants with extreme vigor
get on my level

I'd say Pinyin has these main problems

1) There are semi-vowel consonants written where there are non-pronounced i.e. anything starting with y or w

2) For latin-script language speakers, some of the consonant transcriptions are not intuitive. Firstly, a lot of people think b/d/g/j are voiced, when they are actually just unaspirated unvoiced; c, q, and arguably x are generally unintuitive for non-students of the language to know how to pronounced (z is less so since a lot of European languages do use z for [ts], although English does not)

3) For some reason, [^ei] (where ^ is any consonant sound) is written as ^ui.

4) There are two different vowel qualities for Pinyin i that are not distinguished in writing

You don't pronounce unvoiced plosives and affricate with aspiration when you speak English?

>three main problems
>four points

You misread. I said "these", not "three".

Not at the end of a word, unless I'm speaking very formally or emphatically.

>what about using a Vietnamese-style Roman alphabet?

That's a complete mess.

So you pronounce "kick" with no aspiration at the end? That is a tell-tale sign of a non-native speaker to me (using "native" to mean Anglo-English countries. Maybe Indian or Jamaican English don't aspirate it even though they are native, but I am not counting them for what I mean).

Maybe it's just less aspiration, not a complete lack. English is my mother tongue (I'm American).

Do you aspirate the p in "speak"?

No, because American/British/Australian English does not aspirate p/t/k in the sp/st/sk consonant clusters as a rule. p/t/k are normally aspirated in all circumstances ASIDE from sp/st/sk.

Yale romanization is probably the best for non language study uses.

that one triggers me

>Still using chink characters