Job Discussion Forums

[Steppenwolf]

So we call them "capital letters" or "upper case" versus "lower case" letters. The Roman alphabet, a.k.a. "ABC, has 26 of those; multiply that by two to get 52 for both versions.
In Chinese it is "da xie" ("write big") as opposed to "xiao xie" ("write small").
52 symbols versus 5000 characters (or 56'000 if you are a truly sinophile erudite who gobbles up all Chinese characters ever used in the last two millenia). One would think that the seriously overburdened Chinese mind can easily cope with 52 phonetic signs.
Can they?

For the umpteenth time (counting Chinese teachers' efforts too) I tell them that PROPER NAMES always have to be written with a CAPTIAL initial!
We write "Mao Zexi", not "mao zexI". Or "mao zexi". Who is "mAo zExI?" Unimportant! You have just proved you understand the notion of proper names: Mao Zexi is a proper name albeit of a person no one seems to know!

So why do my students write "English" and "Britain" and the "USA" but 'china' and 'chinese'?

Do they learn at primary school that they have any choice? If they don't like capital 'C's they use lower-case 'c's?

While such mistakes do not show up in their spoken English they certainly show in their papers. They even show in their student name lists: I have got here:

- Mao dunJun
- luo anji
- Ge haoan

My favourite student goes by the name of Nie weiting. Yes, 'waiting nie", so to speak! I imagine the immigration official:
- "Hey you there...yes, you...Wait a minute!"
- Waiting Ni (name order according toaccording to his arrival card): "Yes sir, coming!"

I don't think I am a pedant! My students have plenty of time to proofread any written text they are supposed to hand in or write on the blackboard; yet they commit such mistakes as regularly and as carelessly as though they thought theirs was the correct version.

It must have something to do with how they are taught Chinese and how to write pinyin.

They don't learn to separate words clearly; you may get a romanised address that reads as follows:
shanghaishipudongqufeichanglu618

No better this alternative:
Shang hai shi pu dong qu fei chang lu 6 1 8

The most mind-boggling (for myself) is:
ShangHaiShiPuDongQuFeiChangLu 618

Here a totally unnecessary attempt is made to separate the phonetic components of the address by capitalising the initials of each syllable. How clumsy! How inviting for us to make mistakes in copying it!
It's as though we were supposed to separate each letter from its neighbours in the following manner:
i t ' s a s t h o u g h w e w e r e s u p p o s e d t o s e p a r a t e e a c h l e t t e r f r o m i t s n e i g h b o u r s i n t h e f o l l o w i n g m a n n e r :

Considering the effect such spelling has on the reader, I guess I must force my students to read more spaced-out sentences in English! As a sort of capital punishment, kind of!

[KarenB]

maybe it hassomething to do with the way theylearn pinyin?

In my husband's Chinese class, they're still writing some things in Pinyin, although moving gradually to characters. At any rate, he started a sentence in Pinyin with a capital letter, and his teacher told him it was wrong to use a capital letter (even when he pointed out that the textbook used capital letter). So if it is indeed standard to not use capital letters with pinyin, perhaps that's carrying over to English.

Also, I notice when my students write down their own names in Pinyin, that they almost always write down the 2nd and 3rd name (the given names) as one word -- even though in Chinese they are two words.

One thing that drives me nuts is the way they write commas -- they either make commas that look like periods, or the commas are backward (and apparently that has something to do with Chinese writing as well, because I've seen those backward commas even in typed (Chinese) documents.

[Steppenwolf]

And spaces - they add unnecessary spaces between punctuation marks and the end of the sentence/clause (or the quotation marks and the first letter of the sentence).

I am not sure, KarenB, whether their names should be treated as second and third names (although I have learnt that from some Chinese person). For most their "first names" are composed of two characters which are never separated (thus not viewed as two names). Deng Xiao Ping? Deng Xiao? Deng Ping? I think he would always have wanted to be referred to as "Xiaoping".

It is necessary to standarise the rules; at present anything goes, and that's a bit confusing.