i usually find it a lot easier when traveling longer distances in taxi to tell the driver the vicinity / district you are going to. eg. if i want to go to gold coast from aberdeen. i would tell them new territories. then say tuen moon. then say gold coast.
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10-04-2009, 01:47 PM #51
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11-04-2009, 12:46 AM #52
Howdy neighbour
Love it when peeps jump in the fray...
A while after posting me "TUNE-Wan" bit, it did occur to me that I was presuming readers here know I meant by this the Brit pronunciation (me being from UK & all
). Hm, neglected that others, swayed by N. American accents, will see spelling of "tune" and say sumthin' close to "toon"... Yep, in "Brit English", "tune" can be pronounced like "CHoon".
So you must be "Yank"-tuned, eh..
I know folks near that village (Tai Wai, Shatin), and the location in Chinese is definitely "Sum" ("heart") in Canto. Though WHY the blazes the official Eng street sign reads "Sam" is beyond me, too.
Taxi drivers can't decipher such red herrings... I've actually tried saying just the "Eng version", then had to switch to Canto - only then did it register!
A sometime conundrum, indeed...Last edited by emmie; 11-04-2009 at 12:49 AM.
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11-04-2009, 09:30 AM #53
Nah, I'm not a native at all, so "t" is "t' for me and nothing else. Just like "sum" I would read "soom" first. Actually I realised it's supposed to be read as "sam" when I compared Chinese character 新 (new, sp. san), with how they "spell" it in Yuen Long - Sun. It may seem logical to English readers to read every "u" as "a", but for me each "u" is "oo" first
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11-04-2009, 09:38 PM #54
I think it's because the first Romanization of Cantonese was done by a German missionary, and German uses 'ts'' for that sound. The usage has stuck. I may be wrong!
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11-04-2009, 09:40 PM #55
It's OK, you can be as pedantic as you like on a thread like this!
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12-04-2009, 08:18 AM #56
It would be "tsch" then. "ts" is usually an English transcription of sound of German "z", Polish "c", or Russian "ц" - a sound that doesn't exist in English and a lot of native speakers can even pronounce it
That way or another - it's nowhere near how it should be really pronounced. And I think it goes for most of "ts"s in HK government romanisation
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14-04-2009, 08:57 AM #57
Oh that's really funny .. I had to read it twice to realise what you meant and then the penny dropped and of course tune sounds like choon in english (I think I was not "sounding the word out" in my head the first time I read your original post). Yes, I am english!
A while after posting me "TUNE-Wan" bit, it did occur to me that I was presuming readers here know I meant by this the Brit pronunciation (me being from UK & all ). Hm, neglected that others, swayed by N. American accents, will see spelling of "tune" and say sumthin' close to "toon"... Yep, in "Brit English", "tune" can be pronounced like "CHoon".
It really highlights how hard it is to share pronunciation in written form ...
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18-05-2009, 07:54 AM #58
Haven't been back to this thread in a while, but after reading all the posts, I think I've got it --
To properly pronounce the English version of the Chinese names, I need to pretend I'm English, but I have a Tourettes-like German accent that pops up, except words with a "u", which I pronounce as "a" because I'm from the US (although I've never heard "u" with that sound).
Now I understand why locals doubt that Westerners can learn Canto -- it's not that Canto is hard, we just can't unlearn all the confusing and contradictory rules of English!
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18-05-2009, 10:48 PM #59
What annoys me is when you say Fanta and they don't understand and then you point to the poster and they go 'ahhh FanTAAA' like I said something much different!
Originally Posted by Ling_Ling:
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