I started reading and writing in kindergarten. So, no one was concerned of my reading ability when I entered elementary school. However, before teaching us simple words, our teacher showed us some strange looking symbols: 注音符號 (zhùyin fúhào), phonetic symbols of Chinese Mandarin.
There are thirty-seven symbols and four tone marks. In addition, a dot can be placed above the symbols to indicate the neutral/light tone. (It looks like a staccato mark in music notation and functions like a staccato mark.) The first four consonants ㄅㄆㄇㄈ together have become the metonym of the entire system. A neutral vowel, schwa [ə], is added when pronouncing the consonants individually. ㄅㄆㄇㄈ can be transcribed in International Phonetic Alphabets as: [bə, pə, mə, fə]. However, due to dialects, personal habits and sloppiness, the pronunciations vary from [bo, po, mo, fo], [buo, puo, muo, fuo] to [bɔ, pɔ, mɔ, fɔ].
Dad spoke with heavy Zhejiang (浙江) accent. Mom’s native tongue was Taiwanese. After WWII, mom learned to speak Mandarin, mostly by converting Japanese words and sounds into Chinese. She also picked up some vocabulary from Dad. I knew that my parents talked “funny” and wanted to speak Mandarin well.
We learned that 注音符號 were keys to standard Mandarin. In theory, when combining a consonant with a vowel (or vowels), one would get the sound of certain words. For example: [ㄅ , ㄧ] in first tone would be [bi:] 逼 (force, verb); in second tone would be [bí:] 鼻 (nose); in third tone, [bǐ:] 筆 (pen); so on and so forth.
I believed everything our teacher taught us. And, I was very good in remembering how various combinations of symbols should be pronounced. However, I tied myself into knots trying to figure out how ㄅ [bə] combining with ㄧ [i:] would become [bi:]. In the evening, I walked around the house saying [bəy, bəy, bəy. . .] Our learning materials included a set of long-playing records. One night, I couldn’t sleep and got up to listen to the LP. Needless to say, that didn’t go very well with mom.
Within weeks, my parents subscribed 國語日報 (Mandarin Daily News) for me. It is a children’s newspaper still popular in Taiwan today. All the characters are marked with Zhuyin. Sometimes, it was helpful with my pronunciations of words. Other times, I picked up new words following the phonetics. I also like games and puzzles. As my reading ability and appetite continued to grow, I learned to like the translations of western literature on weekends.
After decades of studying languages, I have come to realize that phonetic symbols are useful tools. However, they can only reveal the very basic sounds of any languages. The nuances, the intonations and the variances taking place when combining sounds are often untranscribable. Each language is unique. To really “hear” a language, one needs to pay attention aurally and intellectually.