Under the guidance of the head of the Department of Integrative and Digital Linguistics of DSTU Marina Semenova, employees and students of the Don State Technical University created a system for denoting Chinese words with letters of the Russian alphabet. This was reported to socialbites.ca in the press service of the university.
As a result of changes in foreign policy in the 1950s, China abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet for phonetic notation and began using the English alphabet, which is the pinyin system. According to scientists, a Russian-speaking person starting to learn Chinese must first learn the English alphabet and reading rules. The authors of the development proposed to make a phonetic recording from Chinese directly to Russian and vice versa, without resorting to the English alphabet.
The verb “to be” in Chinese has a solid consonant “sh”, as in Russian. From the point of view of articulation, we observe that the phonemes of both languages overlap. If this word is written in pinyin, a different sound will be obtained because the combination of the letters sh in English will actually give us a “u”-like sound. In addition, 75% of English words are not read according to the rules, so English artificially complicates the learning of Chinese, ”Associate Professor Marina Semenova, head of the Department of Integrative and Digital Linguistics at DSTU, explained to socialbites.ca. .
The researchers tested the system among students who had never learned Chinese. The same text is deciphered in pinyin and Cyrillic alphabets. Assistance with testing was provided by DSTU graduate students from China. As a result, the text read with Russian letters differed from the correct pronunciation by 0.04%, and the text read with pinyin differed by 15.5%.
The development is in the process of securing the copyright, then it will be published on the Internet for free access. The team also plans to adapt the educational materials to Cyrillic.
Marina Semenova said that in the last 200 years there have been many attempts to create a phonetic alphabet for the Chinese language, including those based on the Cyrillic alphabet. The proposed transcription system is the third system in a row.
The idea for the project was born in September last year when, in the first lesson on Chinese phonetics, students suggested using the Russian alphabet to learn Chinese. The project took 9 months to complete.
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