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How many sounds in pinyin (for example, a ai an ang ao = 5)?
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realmayo -

Hi, does anyone know how many sounds there are in pinyin?
I make it 401, going by a list at www.zhongwen.com.
Does anyone have any different numbers?

To clarify, I reckon on for example five sounds beginning with A: <>.

Thanks.

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fireball9261 -

Do you include the tones?

roddy -

It’ll depend which pinyin chart you look at, as there are some fairly obscure sounds where you
might only have one or two rarely-used characters and these may or may not be included depending
on who is compiling the chart. The one I have handy lists 407. That said, I didn’t count very
carefully.

An example would be 忒, which (according to the ABC) can be pronounced tè,tēi. It’s the only
character which comes up in my IME’s for tei, and ‘tei’ isn’t included in my chart – but it may be
in others. Pinyinput also doesn’t let me type tēi when it’s set to check the pinyin is correct.

Madot -

Dear Realmayo,
Are you counting ‘sounds’ or syllables? From a linguistic point of view, what you have is
‘a’, ‘i’, ‘n’ and ‘ŋ’ (to use the IPA symbols). I don’t know whether ‘ai’
is a diphthong in Chinese (and hence considered a separate ‘sound’ or phoneme) or whether it
is merely the combination of ‘a’ plus ‘i’. So, is your question about how many meaningful
sounds (phonemes)—as opposed to less important variations—there are in Mandarin; or are you
asking how many different syllables (possible sound combinations) there are?

Mado

imron -

Also of possible interest, is tables like this one.

Quote:

Pinyinput also doesn’t let me type tēi when it’s set to check the pinyin is correct.

That would probably be a bug I blame it on the table I used, which also lacked tei.

realmayo -

Thank you very much for your replies.
It is in fact the total number of different chinese syllables as rendered in pinyin that I was
after, ie how many entries are there in a pinyin chart. And I wasn’t including the tones.
So Roddy’s 407 is encouraging, hardly any more than the 401 I had. I don’t want to suddenly find
an extra 10 or 20 that I hadn’t counted on, although I know that they’d be getting more & more
obscure at this point.

atitarev -

Good link, Imron

I wonder if there exists a complete list with possible tone combinations in standard Mandarin?

hzh-fa -

I haven`t count how many sounds in pingyi.
but i think the “xin hua” dictionary having all.
and i consider there isn`t five sounds beginning with A: <>.
because every one have 4 syllables.

realmayo -

In case you’re interested why: I’m finally getting around to using a system to memorise how to
write characters. In a nutshell, you have to assign every pinyin sound its own “person” and
“place”. For the “people”, you have to write down the names of 10 memorable characters from a film
or tv series or whatever that you know well, and do that for about 40 films (hence, just over 400
people, grouped by cast list, for the 400-odd sounds).
The “places” are determined by identifying around 15 buildings you know well (eg places you’ve
lived) each with five rooms or so: and in every room you have a little journey (in a set
direction, eg clockwise) which moves around five key places in that room.
So, for example, for the letter A which I reckon begins only 5 pinyin sounds, I might assign the
top half of the cast of CSI Miami, and the living room of an old flat I lived in in China: hence:

a … Horatio … telephone table
ai … Frank … desk
an … Calleigh … tv
ang … Delko … water dispenser
ao … Wolfe … nasty hard wooden armchair

So to recall the character for love ai4 爱, I can first bring to mind the setting of my old desk.

Also: each of the four tones is to be associated with four brand new individuals: say I’ve chosen
Richard Branson (I haven’t…) for all fourth tones.

And various radicals and key character components also have their own associations, associated
with the “people” if the component is itself a character (“you” for 友, the bottom part of 爱).

So: a version of my “story” for 爱 would take place at my desk in my old room in China. Branson
is there, looking in love, holding up a cooked chicken foot (which I’m associating with the
radical at the top of 爱) while the “person” I’m associating with 友 is cowering embarassed
under a bit hat (which I’m associating with the middle part of the 爱 character).

This method taken from a defunct website called haoyao.com.
I was pointed in its direction by a thread on sinosplice.com –
http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archi…in-tone-tricks –
to the archived version of the haoyao.com website:
http://web.archive.org/web/200012041…oyao.com/#body .

imron -

This strikes me as being incredibly complicated and confusing. Spending the time remembering which
character goes with which person and which place, seems to me like more effort than just
remembering how to write the character in the first place!

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> Announcements > Bug Reports / Help
New Unanswered Posts function
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roddy -

To try and cut down on the number of questions that slip past unnoticed and don’t get an answer,
I’ve added an ‘unanswered’ link to the header. Click on it and you get a list of all posts within
the last week that have not yet had any answers.

Obviously there will always be some unanswered posts – it might be an announcement so nobody needs
to reply, it might be a question that nobody knows the answer to, etc, but if you are ever feeling
big-hearted, click on the link and see if you can help someone out

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liuzhou -

I hope you’re not expecting an answer to this!

ooops!

venture160 -

I like it! Thanks for the hard work Roddy!

roddy -

Couple of little extras which don’t really deserve their own thread.

The ‘What’s going on’ section of the Forums listing now keeps a record of
a) The most members online in one day. Previously it would show you who had visited in the last 24
hours. It will now also tell you what the highest number of members online in one day is in
recorded history, recorded history having started about half an hour ago. Highest figure is
therefore the current one, 250, which is as high as I’ve ever seen it. You’ll see a lower figure I
think, as you can’t see invisible members.
b) Some simple stats on guest and search engine bot activity.

PS. It’s not hard work. It’s what I do instead of hard work

imron -

Perhaps you could make it disregard Yahoo! Slurp Spiders ( 1388 ), Google AdSense Spiders (2),
Google Spiders (4), AltaVista Spiders (1), MSNBot Spiders (14) in the results. I think they’re
skewing the guest numbers somewhat

roddy -

I think the only other option with this plug in is to have spiders included in the Guests figure,
so it’s probably better to have the separated out. I’m hoping there’ll be some return for all
those Yahoo spiders at some point – they’re currently eating almost twice as much bandwidth as
Googlebot and delivering about 1/20th the traffic.

adrianlondon -

Does anyone use this feature? I clicked on it for the first time today and decided I won’t do it
again. It just lists any thread with no replies. It obviously has no logic to work out whether the
opening post contains a question or not – that’d be too hard – but you could at least not display
the classified ads which otherwise make up the bulk of the display.

However, the main issue is … most of the questions which are worth answering are likely to be in
threads where people have already had a go at it, i.e. ones with more than one post.

The solution? Either give up and remove the “unanswered” button, leave it there and forget about
it, or have some sort of function whereby the thread originator can tick “this is a question” and
can then tick “answered” when they feel they’ve got a response. Maybe it could force them to
provide an email address which you then email, a month later, and say “come back and update us” or
something.

Hmm. The moon is great, looks pretty and all that, but – you know, it’d be much better if I could
have it on this here stick.

zhwj -

I’ve used the unanswered posts function a few times – and answered in one or two cases. Apart from
the classifieds, many of the posts with 0 responses can be easily answered with pointers back to
earlier discussions.

I sometimes mark all messages as read after I’ve taken a good half hour reading a few threads, so
new posts may have collected in that period of time.

It’s not doing any harm sitting up there, is it? I say just leave it there (and possibly eliminate
the classified category from the list).

muyongshi -

Quick question about this: is it possible to remove the classified from the unanswered link since
only admins can answer anyway? That way the posts that are really important to get answered don’t
get overlooked by 5 classified posts that sit there at the top for a day.

roddy -

Originally I thought no, but I think now you could do it. Have a look at the HTML behind the
advanced search form and see if you can figure out what the url should be for a direct link.

Incidentally, with the classifieds, nobody should be answering – it’s for announcements rather
than discussions. However, it’s not possible to remove an admin users ability to post, so every
now and then one of us fails to notice a post is in classifieds and imparts some of our infinite
wisdom.

Also, you may sometimes notice posts listed there which do have replies. Search results are
cached. That’s why. Should only last an hour or so.

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> Learning Chinese > Reading and Writing
translating Hu Shi’s poem “一笑“
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natalie -

Hello everyone.

I’m trying to translate the following poem but so far I got stuck in
“那个人后来不知怎样了
只是他那一笑还在”. I’d be very grateful if someone could help me understand the whole
piece.

一笑
胡适

十几年前
一个人对我笑了一笑
我当时不懂得什么
只觉得他笑得很好
　
那个人后来不知怎样了
只是他那一笑还在
我不但忘不了他
还觉得他越久越可爱
　
我借他做了许多情诗
我替他想出种种境地
有的人读了伤心
有的人读了欢喜
　
欢喜也罢 伤心也罢
其实只是那一笑
我也许不会再见那笑的人
但我很感谢他笑的真好
　

Thank you and have a blessed and blissful 周末,

Natalie

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yonglin -

I’d say “那个人后来不知怎样了, 只是他那一笑还在”

reads as something to the extent of

I don’t know whatever happened to that person
yet I his smile still lingers on my mind

That is, although he only met the person once, that person smiled in such a way which was very
difficult to forget (left a very deep impression).

I’m really not a poet, though.

and yeh, the 的 in the last line should be 得, i think.

fireball9261 -

一笑 A smile

胡适 Hu Shi

十几年前
Over 10 years ago

一个人对我笑了一笑
Some one smiled to me

我当时不懂得什么
I did not understand at the time

只觉得他笑得很好
I only thought he smiled well
　
那个人后来不知怎样了
I don’t know what happened to him later

只是他那一笑还在
However, his smile is still here

我不但忘不了他
Not only I can’t forget about his smile

还觉得他越久越可爱
I feel that his smile is more and more lovely as time goes on

　
我借他做了许多情诗
I used it (his smile) created many love poems

我替他想出种种境地
I made up many situations for it (his smile)

有的人读了伤心
Some read my poems feel sad

有的人读了欢喜
Some read my poems feel happy
　
欢喜也罢 伤心也罢
Whether they are sad or happy

其实只是那一笑
It’s just a smile

我也许不会再见那笑的人
Maybe I will never see that person who smiled

但我很感谢他笑的真好
But I am really grateful that he smiled well.
　
Hi Natalie, it’s hard to understand the “他” in this poem because it is very ambiguous. The
changing subjects in the lines of this poem are also very confusing. It is the special character
of the poem in Hu Shi’s era (and probably the modern Chinese poems). Many of the poets tried for
this ambiguous feeling just like they were trying to cause hard times to future students who are
studying 20th century Chinese poems. This poem is actually not that bad. I only need to read it 3
or 4 times before I figured it out the “他” in this poem. There were a few modern Chinese poems
that I couldn’t get the subjects straight after 20 years of looking at them!!!

natalie -

thank you so much!

both your explanations really helped, now I look at it and it’s not so intimidating anymore! It’s
like magic

and fireball- a special thank you for your effort, you’re a true angel!

fireball9261 -

You are welcome. I like this poem also. Thanks for reminding me that Hu Shi was also a good poet!

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