The Chinese pronunciation of some (read all) YouTubers is so sad.

[Anal Stretchmarks]

I've been studying Chinese for about ~1 year, and I have to say that I literally just can't watch most YouTubers. I get so annoyed about their mispronunciations and I want to correct them SOOO bad!

YouTube用户的中文不好

[RCMidas]

Probably because they're working off of a transliteration system that is so inaccurate I truly cannot envisage how its creator ever thought it would work. Or why. The Cao family is a perfect illustration of this. How exactly do you turn "Tsa'o" into "Cao", when the letter "C" has only two sounds, neither of which correlate to "Ts"?!

Sure, the names look vaguely more simple, but they aren't even remotely acoustically correct under that system.

[Anal Stretchmarks]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

Probably because they're working off of a transliteration system that is so inaccurate I truly cannot envisage how its creator ever thought it would work. Or why. The Cao family is a perfect illustration of this. How exactly do you turn "Tsa'o" into "Cao", when the letter "C" has only two sounds, neither of which correlate to "Ts"?!

Sure, the names look vaguely more simple, but they aren't even remotely acoustically correct under that system.

Personally, my favorite is "Q" - in Chinese, it is pronounced like a light, yet exaggerated "ch", yet they always pronounce it like a "k"

[Ason]

That's probably because(and I'm just shooting in the dark here) they don't speak Chinese..... lol

[RCMidas]

Hell I started learning the names using that system myself because I was ignorant of any other. Now I'm stuck thinking in that limited way and have to "manually" rejigger my mental pronunciation every time. It hurts, dammit!

[JimmyTheSnake]

Can you blame anyone who's not a Chinese speaker? There is so little Chinese history taught in schools, so you have absolutely no familiarity with any of the pronunciations. I had to spend a long time typing the words into a pronunciation website just to get the simplest names down. Now after watching about 30 episodes of Three Kingdoms, I can finally sort follow what is being said by listening and reading.

Why don't you make a video about it? I would watch it. Just go through the main names and some of the commanderies' names.

[Ashantai]

Yes, we're working off a very strange transliteration convention which doesn't sound anything like the letters do in English.
There is no circumstance where Cao Cao in English has a soft Tsa'o sound. It would either be Ko-Ko or Cow-Cow.

So what happens is that we non Chinese speakers have to keep reminding ourselves that the way it's pronounced has a different tone to how it's written.

They really need to release a more accurate system to help us ignorant foreigners, lol.

[Wraith]

Originally posted by JimmyTheSnake:

Can you blame anyone who's not a Chinese speaker? There is so little Chinese history taught in schools, so you have absolutely no familiarity with any of the pronunciations. I had to spend a long time typing the words into a pronunciation website just to get the simplest names down. Now after watching about 30 episodes of Three Kingdoms, I can finally sort follow what is being said by listening and reading.

Why don't you make a video about it? I would watch it. Just go through the main names and some of the commanderies' names.

^
I could learn Latin which is a dead language faster then I could learn Chinese because it just isn't taught here.

[Ashantai]

I'd actually love to have a bi-lingual speaker do the proper pronounciation of the names in a video or guide.

[RCMidas]

Originally posted by Ashantai:

Yes, we're working off a very strange transliteration convention which doesn't sound anything like the letters do in English.
There is no circumstance where Cao Cao in English has a soft Tsa'o sound. It would either be Ko-Ko or Cow-Cow.

So what happens is that we non Chinese speakers have to keep reminding ourselves that the way it's pronounced has a different tone to how it's written.

They really need to release a more accurate system to help us ignorant foreigners, lol.

They *did*, before Pinyin became the inexplicable gold standard. It was called Wade-Giles and it WORKS, dammit! And even Taiwan, which was using it without a problem for the century, has now officially switched over to Hanyu Pinyin.

Dialects be damned, when it comes to Pinyin: It. Is. Wrong. It. Is. Inaccurate.

[minja]

Or hell, even a list of proper pronunciations for the major characters in this thread.

The transliteration convention is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥ that many young Chinese people in the US are super self-conscious about name pronunciation, etc.

I've had quite a few Chinese colleagues over the years, and the lengths they went to to try to fit in were crazy. The two that stick out the most were named Xinfa and Hu (pronounced phonetically, for once), and started out trying to go by Joseph and Ken. One day I asked them what their given names were, and just started laughing when they told me. They were devastated until I told them that their Chinese names were super easy for most people, and to just go by those.

[Popeye]

If Creative Assembly went with the Wade-Giles spelling it would be very easy for the youtubers to properly pronounce the names. Wade-Giles was made by distinguished english speakers and diplomats for english speakers (thanks British colonialism!) Whereas the other version did not see much western input and was made as part of the commies' cultural propaganda machine (being fair though I should point out that many of the creators of pinyin did study abroad). I learned the Wade-Giles version so when I see Cao Cao, I'm like who? Ts'ao Ts'ao? For anyone interested in pronouncing the names properly, I recommend visiting http://kongming.net/novel/wade-giles_to_pinyin/

[Hollywood]

AH MAN?! How dare someone not speak the language fluently of one of the most xenophobic countries in history! I can't stand watching people trying be considerate to the one form of language in the world that is both popular and not based off Greco-Roman roots like every other language in the world that matters.

[Ashantai]

That's a very good site, Beaumont, thanks!

[lemurs2]

Beaumont, you are incorrect, and seemingly just trying to score against 'commies'. Pinyin is based on a number of systems from before the Communists took over China.
The head of the Pinyin organization was the same man who had headed an earlier movement to reform the language under the Kuomintang.

[Anal Stretchmarks]

Originally posted by hollywoodkik:

AH MAN?! How dare someone not speak the language fluently of one of the most xenophobic countries in history! I can't stand watching people trying be considerate to the one form of language in the world that is both popular and not based off Greco-Roman roots like every other language in the world that matters.

Why are you being a prick on a discussion of Chinese language history? If you don't want to be polite, politely ♥♥♥♥ off.