FSI Chinese. Buy this domain. fsi-language-courses.com. One Minute Languages: learn a language in minutes with the Radio Lingua Network. May I take your order? Yingzi. Also see the Belorussian translation provided by Fatcow. The English spelling system is such a pain, we'd might as well switch to hanzi-- Chinese characters. How should we go about it? Japanese style One way would be to use hanzi directly, asthe Japanese do. For instance, we'd write "work" as , and "ruler" as. . , and "tycoon" as You can already see that this is going to be tricky. Two readings, for instance-- /wrk/ and /gûng/-- and two as well-- /rulr/ and /kun/. Proper names will be a problem as well.
For the name of the bodaciously cute singer Faye Wong-- but for English names we'd have no better recourse than to spell things out using the nearest Chinese syllables. Chinese style Maybe there's a better approach. The basic principle will be, one yingzi for a syllable with a particular meaning. Does that mean we need a completely separate symbol for each of the thousands of possible English syllables? Little pictures Well, now's the time. Woods repeats the yingzi for tree, while Phonetic classes. Internet Polyglot - Lessons: Chinese - English - Free Online Language Courses. Livemocha: Learn Languages and Practice with Native Speakers. Foreign Languages and Literatures | 21F.101 Chinese I (Regular), Spring 2006.