200 CultureShock! China
pair a non-local who otherwise has the skills for the job with a
speaker of the local dialect to assist as ‘guide’. When hiring or
making domestic transfers, this needs to be kept in mind.Romanisation Pronouncing Chinese:
Whichever dialect you choose to learn, unless you want
to jump straight into learning written Chinese characters
(unwise), you will need to have a way to note down the
pronunciation of the spoken language using English letters.
Some businesspeople invent their own idiosyncratic
notations, and there are advantages to that. But there are
also advantages (in consistency and ability to communicate
with other learners and teachers) in using one of the systems
developed over years by foreigners studying Chinese. These
are called Romanisation systems—ways of writing down the
sounds of spoken Chinese using the letters of the English
(Roman) alphabet.
For many years, there were seemingly as many ways of
Romanising Chinese characters as there were students of
Chinese, and some of their spellings differed surprisingly
widely. For instance, the character ሗ, meaning ‘strong’, can
be spelled in various Romanisation systems: zhuang, jhuang,
jwang, chuang, jwang, joang or juanq. All these spellings refer
to the same character—they are all simply different ways that
different Westerners have devised to help them come closer
to the sound represented by the character ሗ. Similarly, when
Peking became Beijing in Western newspapers, the characters
were not changed and remained Сࣟ. The difference was a
political choice on the part of Western newspapers to switch
from the Romanisation system popular in Taiwan to the one
popular in Beijing.
Today, two Romanisation systems have become more-
or-less standard: the Wade-Giles system, invented by two
19th century British missionaries (yes, Mr Wade and Mr
Giles) is the system of choice in Taiwan and among many
overseas Chinese learners. And the Hanyu Pinyin system,
developed largely by Russian sinologists in the 20th century,
is standard in mainland China and increasingly throughout
the Chinese-speaking world.