Choices, Choices

In Taiwan, we speak “國語” (guoyu, “national language”) or “中文” (zhongwen, the neutral term for Chinese language) if you’re an American or American-born Taiwanese. Whereas textbooks in the United States seem predominantly written with a globally-salient Mainland China in mind, Chinese education in Taiwan comes with a new batch of vocabulary and a new mindset from using traditional characters – many prefer to call it “正體字” (zhengtizi, “official”) rather than “繁體字” (fantizi, “complicated”) –  to spelling the pronunciation notation using “bopomo,” or the “注音符號” (zhuyinfuhao) system rather than Hanyu Pinyin. I was already aware of the traditional v. simplified battle, which I’m sure takes place at Georgetown every time a new class of Chinese language beginners choose which system they will learn. I was more surprised by the cultural battleground over how one teaches or learns notation for the pronunciation of Chinese characters.

If you learn Chinese at Georgetown, you will exclusively learn Hanyu Pinyin. Because I had completely forgotten the “bopomo” alphabet I learned as a child, I had no qualms adapting to the Hanyu Pinyin system and found that using the already-familiar Roman alphabet was relatively easy to grasp, especially after a few weeks of practice. So while I realize why many foreign students, particularly from Western countries where the Roman alphabet is used, champion Hanyu Pinyin with passion, I have discovered that Taiwanese students and teachers have no fewer reasons to defend the “bopomo” system.

The fact that the Roman alphabet cannot accurately capture many sounds in Chinese, leading to incorrect pronunciation. That if you learn from a young age, “bopomo” is no harder to learn than the rules for using Hanyu Pinyin. The observation that learning Chinese is not an American-centric endeavor, that many students in Taiwan now are from countries where the Roman alphabet is not used. For decades, Taiwanese schoolchildren have been learning “bopomo” before they learn to read characters, so the system clearly produces results. “Bopomo” is a local characteristic of Taiwan and should be preserved. Hanyu Pinyin lets foreigners think English can be translated into Chinese so simply and confuses Taiwanese schoolchildren when they learn to pronounce and spell in English. And the reasons go on. Sometimes the reasons become definitively political – we don’t want anything created by Mainland China especially in regards to our culture, is the implied message from the more nationalistic – but either way, it’s clear that language and language education is intimately connected with the notion of identity.

In the end, the notation is only a means to an end, which is learning to write and pronounce Chinese characters. I started relearning the “bopomo” alphabet, just to understand when friends write down notation for me and just because I’d like to remember again. It would be interesting to see more concrete data on learning methods using both systems.