Preface: im an angloid myself who is still learning Chinese [although my instructor said I have good tones, so I’m gonna ride that compliment for a while] so I’m not expecting fluent proficiency.
But I was Watching someone and they fucking pronounced 秦始皇/Qin Shi Huang as “Kwin” Shi Huang…What?! Fucking Quinn? Other people will do it and pronounce Qing and “Kwing.”
There’s no U! It doesn’t follow English pronunciation! You’re forcing a round peg into a square hole you numbskulls!
And this goes for any language. If you need to know how to pronounce a name, just look it up or don’t even say it. Don’t just flounder your pronounciation by not even trying.
Ugh, sorry, I don’t know why I get so worked up over this.
Making up the pronunciation as you go might be excusable if you doing it live and unscripted. But the number of angloids who will unashamedly do it in prerecorded and scripted videos clearly showing they can’t be bothered to look it up is too damn high.
I’d leave it up solely to underscore the irony of what it represents compared to what the American Empire actually stood for.
And then you read english translations and stuff like Kumintang is written.
It’s Guo Min Dang. Literally translated to national people’s party.
It’s because Pinyin was introduced by the PRC and the ROC still uses Wade-Giles
Pinyin makes much more sense to me, but that’s probably just my bias because that’s how I learned it. The problem ultimately is that both systems don’t map one to one with English pronunciation, and the same characters sometimes map differently in the two systems. Both systems have their pros and cons.
Oh wow. Fits the pattern of third world nationalist parties being self contradictory.
This is pretty much how I approach it. I either learn how to pronounce it correctly or just don’t say it at all.
