I've seen all the old forum threads and the FAQ about how bopomofo is low priority and not going to be added soon, but I just wanted to add my voice to the requests for bopomofo. If bopomofo is low priority because it is not requested that much, then it sounds to me like bopomofo users need to let Skritter know their preference so that it will one day move up from the bottom of Skritter's "To Do" list. I live and study in Taiwan, I use zhuyin to type on my phone and on the computer, my textbooks all include zhuyin, and I use zhuyin when I take notes and annotate characters, so it would be nice if it is added as an option one day. But I still love Skritter. Thanks for the great app!

If there's enough demand, we can definitely entertain the idea, but this is the first time I've heard anyone mention zhuyin in a really long time (and I read through a lot of emails). Speak now, people, or forever hold your peace!

I would also love to have bopomofo as an option. I too use it everyday as I live in Taipei. I don't really find that Pinyin can mimic the correct sounds for Chinese, but Bopomofo is pretty hard to mistake the sound, unless you forgot the character.

Just like Skritter has both complex and simplified characters it would be nice to see the zhuyin and pinyin pronunciation.

Would absolutely love to have Zhuyin support.

I suspect that most of the Zhuyin fans have already read the FAQ which basically says it's already been requested and isn't considered a high priority. Hence the lack of the recent requests.

"I don't really find that Pinyin can mimic the correct sounds for Chinese"

Why? There is an almost one-to-one correspondence between zhuyin and pinyin. If it's because you pronounce pinyin according to some other language, then you haven't learned pinyin well enough.

I think the hardest thing for me learning pinyin (I learned pinyin in college but zhuyin as a child) was disassociating the phonics I had learned with the Latin alphabet the first time around. "x", "q" were hard for me. I would have to think twice and make sure I was in the right mode.

While there is a one-to-one correspondence with pinyin and zhuyin, there is not a one-to-one correspondence with the Latin character and pinyin and this drives me nuts. In my amateur eyes, I have seen pinyin changes whether the sound is "in the the middle" vs at then beginning of the word. For example, 多 in "duo" in pinyin. But 我 is "wo". What happened to the u? Samething with "wu" and "tu" Why do you need to put a "w" in "wu"? And when my amateur and western eyes see "wu", I want to pronounce it like "woo" as opposed to "oo"

When I see these character combinations I either a) Try to translate to zhuyin in my very tiny brain, or b) try to find a word I know how to pronounce in mandarin and look up its pinyin and see if they are the same. Hence it would be really helpful for me to see the zhuyin.

What do you mean by Latin character? There is not one way to pronounce the letters that are the same in languages using the Latin script. Obviously the letters have to be read differently in different languages that uses Latin script. Learning pinyin is like learning to spell in another European language but easier since it is much more consistent and phonetic (compared, e.g., to French and English, that both are very non-phonetic).

"What do you mean by Latin character? There is not one way to pronounce the letters that are the same in languages using the Latin script."

Based on the examples eyu gave, I interpreted their comment about Latin characters to mean that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between Latin characters and sounds in Chinese. They were not referring to the pronunciation of the Latin alphabet in any other language. For example, w and u represent the same sound, depending on the position in the syllable. So that is a 2-to-1 correspondence. Other examples in pinyin are n, r, y, i, h, o, and u. Zhuyin does not have (most) of these 2-to-1 or 1-to-2 correspondences. The initial r and final r, which are pronounced differently, are represented by two different characters in Zhuyin. The initial y and medial i, which are essentially the same sound in most cases, are represented by the same character in Zhuyin. While there are a few characters in Zhuyin that change pronunciation slightly depending on context, I think in general it is closer than pinyin to having a one-to-one correspondence between characters and Chinese pronunciation. Of course, the trade-off is that Zhuyin has more individual characters (37) than Pinyin (26), and they are completely unique characters that one has to memorize.

Even though I personally prefer Zhuyin, I would not say that it is definitively better than Piyin. Clearly the few minor issues I have with Pinyin have not prevented hundreds of thousands of people around the world from learning Chinese just fine. And I do have one or two issues with Zhuyin, it is not a perfect system either. I think there are many different factors that make either Zhuyin or Pinyin better for an individual learner: one's mother tongue, one's previous experience learning languages, the location where one is studying Chinese, one's ability to memorize new symbols, whether one is learning Chinese as a first or foreign language, etc. For me, my native language is English, and I have also studied several other languages that are either written in the Latin alphabet or use a standard romanization system, so when I was first learning Pinyin, I found it difficult to suppress the numerous associations between Latin characters and sounds that were already in my brain. But since I had previously studied Japanese, which required learning hiragana and katakana, I did not find it as difficult to memorize Zhuyin, since the Zhuyin characters are similar in design to katakana. Also, since I am living and studying in Taiwan, Zhuyin is much more prevalent than Pinyin, and most Taiwanese people know the Zhuyin system but not Pinyin, so it is more useful for discussing pronunciation with friends and language partners here. For these reasons, I feel that Zhuyin better suits my personal situation.

Also, a huge area where I'm finding Zhuyin more and more helpful is that differences in Pinyin tend be more visually subtle.

For example, I routinely get "an" and "ang" endings confused, always having to remember which words have a G at the end and which don't. Whereas Zhuyin it's two completely different symbols, ㄢ and ㄤ and much easier to tell apart.

Same with words that have medials.
If you're looking at Pinyin, it's a lot harder to remember if it's 5 characters (with no medial) or 6 characters (with a medial)
In Zhuyin, it's always either 2 or 3 characters (sometimes 1)

Think of it this way; what's harder to remember?

"Chuang" vs "Chang"
or
"ㄔㄨㄤ" vs "ㄔㄤ"

"Chuan" vs "Chuang"
or
"ㄔㄨㄢ" vs "ㄔㄨㄤ"

Your mileage may very, but for me there's a lot of little instances where the Zhuyin is easier to memorise.

(I haven't even touched on pronunciation, another huge reason why I prefer Zhuyin, because Eyu and Ramsey1988 have already covered that issue so eloquently)

I would also like to see Zhuyin as an option on Skritter.

Also, I think this forum was started not to argue the merits of which system, Zhuyin or Pinyin, is better, but for the Skritter team to see if there is a demand for Zhuyin. Like ramsey1988, "I feel that Zhuyin better suits my personal situation" because I live and study in Taiwan where Zhuyin is predominantly used. So if the option of Zhuyin were available, that'd be grand.

Won't the demand for zhuyin be roughly equal to the number of people on skritter studying traditional characters only? Plus assume some people don't use skritter (vs. pleco etc.) as doesn't offer zhuyin. Or do many people in Taiwan study characters with pinyin too? I thought Taiwan had (officially) switched to pinyin a few years ago, is it that textbooks haven't caught up yet, or do textbooks put pinyin and zhuyin with characters, and you choose which to use?

@ricksh: All textbooks for foreigners in in Taiwan that i have seen (and I have seen quite a few) have Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin (and sometimes other variants). It's also very common for teachers to mostly use Hanyu Pinyin because of requests from students. I don't know if anyone has done a survey of the ratio between Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin users in Taiwan, but based on my experience learning Chinese in Taiwan for four years, I would guess it's about half-half. This is foreign students, obviously, natives tend to have only a vague idea about Hanyu Pinyin.

At the risk of throwing a gas canister in the fire, wouldn't the work to add zhuyin as an option make it trivial to add yutping?

Just wondering how to test zhuyin. Use a keyboard with zhuyin on it, or a virtual zhuyin keyboard is shown?

我也想學注音符號。

Sign me up too as a wannabe Skritter Bopo mofo :)

I keep wanting to use zhuyin more to get away from some bad Pinyin pronunciation habits. Also it seems more concise and elegant.

PS: is there exactly a one-to-one zhuyin/pinyin mapping?

ㄩ sometimes maps to pinyin ü (ü, üe, üan, ün), sometimes to i (iong).

Just FYI I was surprised and pleased to find the beta Android app allows using zhuyin instead of pinyin.

http://blog.skritter.com/2014/06/skritter-for-android-beta-release.html

From the wikipedia page on zhuyin:

"Zhuyin and pinyin are based on the same Mandarin pronunciations, hence there is a 1-to-1 correspondence between the two systems. In the table below, the 'Zhuyin' and 'pinyin' columns show equivalency."

Yeah clearly there's a one-to-one mapping at the syllable level, but the mapping at the lower, symbol, level is not always one-to-one, as shown in the exceptions listed on the page below.

It's a really minor point, but it this imperfect mapping might explain something that was puzzling me.

A few pronunciations on Skritter sound strange to me. For example, for the 英 in 英雄, I hear something like "yieng" instead of "ying".

http://www.skritter.com/scratchpad?word=英雄

I couldn't understand why someone would pronounce it that way. But it makes more sense if you look at the zhuyin for 英: it's ㄧㄥ, which naively maps back to "i-eng" in pinyin, not "ying".

I imagine that zhuyin transcriptions introduce their own pronunciation artifacts, which are different from (and maybe fewer than) the ones in pinyin.

But IANAL (I'm not a linguist) so I may have this wrong.

Here's a page that lists all the exceptions to a straightforward mapping of zhuyin to pinyin:

http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~nsw/chinese/pinyin.htm

Exceptions for some vowels (but not consonants):

i and ou (ㄧㄡ) combine to iu (e.g., 溜 liu)
i and en (ㄧㄣ) combine to in (e.g., 林 lin)
i and eng (ㄧㄥ) combine to ing (e.g., 令 ling)
u and ei (ㄨㄟ) combine to ui (e.g., 雖 sui)
u and en (ㄨㄣ) combine to un (e.g., 孫 sun)
u and eng (ㄨㄥ) combine to ong (e.g., 松 song)
er (ㄦ) at the end of a character becomes just r.

Note that "u" stands for both wu (ㄨ) and yu (ㄩ), usually without any confusion. Exceptions are in combination with consonants "l" and "n" where a distinction needs to be made (路 lu and 綠 lu:) (奴 nu and 女 nu:) (In some pinyin input methods, we spell lu: and nu: instead with accent characters lü and nü or with non-accent characters lyu and nyu.)

Note that "e" stands for both ㄜ and ㄝ, usually without any confusion. The only exception is when ㄝ is used alone as in 誒; in that case spell e^.

One more exception to the rule for ZhuYin symbols that can stand alone:

In ZhuYin, ㄧ, ㄨ, and ㄩ can stand alone. In PinYin, combine the consonant and vowel, i.e., yi, wu, and yu, respectively.
In ZhuYin, ㄓ, ㄔ, ㄕ, ㄖ, ㄗ, ㄘ, and ㄙ can stand alone. In PinYin, append "i" i.e., zhi, chi, shi, ri, zi, ci, and si, respectively.

From the wikipedia page on bijection:

"one-to-one correspondence is a function between the elements of two sets, where every element of one set is paired with exactly one element of the other set, and every element of the other set is paired with exactly one element of the first set."

So if we only consider complete spellings in both systems, then I would consent that there is 1-to-1 correspondence, in that any syllable spelled in Zhuyin has exactly one correct Pinyin spelling and vice versa. But I don't think that anyone disputes that.

If you are talking about each Zhuyin character corresponding to exactly one unique pinyin letter or letter combination, both in isolation and in combination with other characters (which is what I was discussing previously), then I would still say there is not a 1-to-1 correspondence. The most obvious example is "weng" and "ong" which both correspond to ㄨㄥ in the table. ㄨ by itself is a good example, because it can correspond to "wu"(ㄨ), "u"(ㄈㄨ = fu), "w"(ㄨㄢ = wan) and "o"(ㄓㄨㄥ = zhong), depending on the context.

Then there is also ㄝ and ㄜ both corresponding to "e" (although the Wikipedia page gives ê for ㄝ, but apparently that is only used as an isolated sound, so when combined with other sounds it is represented as "e").

So I guess saying "there's a 1-to-1 correspondence between Zhuyin and Pinyin" is ultimately ambiguous, because there IS a 1-to-1 correspondence between SYLLABLES in both systems (which is actually true for any two Chinese phonetic notation systems), but not between CHARACTERS of the two systems.

Wow, Kai Carver, you beat me to the punch AND gave a better explanation! *slow clap*

@ramsey1988, nono, your reply made me re-read the whole discussion, and I realized you had already made those basic points, I just hadn't read the thread carefully. In fact, I had seen @cemeterymink's mention of "Eyu and Ramsey1988", but I thought it was a research paper, yet I could only find Ramsey 1987, "The Languages of China", which looks like a good book but doesn't appear to discuss this aspect of zhuyin :D

So anyway, I have been using zhuyin with the beta Android Skritter app, and it's great. I actually don't know zhuyin well yet, so I am learning it as I go along, and I like getting away from distracting romanizations. What have the Romans ever done for us, anyway!

And now to correct that Wikipedia article quoted by @xiaokaka... :)

@Molndrake - thanks, interesting.

@Kai Carver

I've always seen pinyin (zhuyin etc.) as representations of how chinese pronounce characters and not impacting pronunciations as such, but are you suggesting that zhuyin representation has changed how 英雄 is pronounced (you describe these as pronunciation artifacts)?

@ricksh I'm not qualified to say, but I guess that zhuyin or pinyin representation could at least influence how people speak when they are trying to speak "correctly", as in an educational mode.

There may also be some hypercorrection, since some speakers pronounce "yin" and "ying" similarly.

I also think the standard pronunciation is not a natural pronunciation for anyone, and "natural pronunciation" evolves over time, so even native speakers have to make an effort to pronounce things the standard way. And if the standard way is encoded slightly differently in pinyin and zhuyin, that can lead to small differences in "correct pronunciation".

Most languages aren't saddled with an encoded "standard pronunciation" that was fixed at one time for all time.

This essay from 1961 is an interesting perspective on the effort to define a standard Chinese pronunciation:
"What is Correct Chinese" by Yuen Ren Chao
http://books.google.com.tw/books?id=Ky6sAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA72

@Kai Carver. Thanks for the article. I think you are right, native mainland speakers do tend to see pinyin as definitive of how characters should be spoken (so is frozen I suppose, as you say). I wonder, do taiwanese see zhuyin as fulfilling the same role

I bet @Molndrake could give us a good answer :)

Yes! BoPoMoFo!! Looking forward to this coming sometime in the future!