Why is it when Chinese words are spelling with Roman letters they are spelled like that?

2.73K views

In many languages that don’t use the latin alphabet (a, b, c, ect…) words are often written romanized so people not familiar with that script can understand. For example, in Japanese with word for thank you is ありがとう. It is romanized like arigato and pronouned ah-ree-gag-toh. However in Chinese, the word for that you is 谢谢 and is romanized as Xie Xie. It’s pronouned Shay-Shay. Another example is the word that’s romanized as Qing is pronounced “Shing”. Why is this? Why isn’t 谢谢 romanized as Shay Shay. Why isn’t Qing written as Shing?

In: Culture

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s a foreign mispronunciation. Xie is pronounced “see-eh”, but just one syllable. Qing is not pronounced “Shing” either. Like another comment mentioned, once you get used to pinyin (characters written romanized), you’d be able to read pinyin easily. It’s like Romaji (for Japanese), for instance “to” is pronounced as such instead of reading it like English.

You are viewing 1 out of 3 answers, click here to view all answers.