• Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 days ago

    水 and 冰 do not sound similar at all in Putonghua, and the same goes for other characters that I have dealt with so far. Not sure how it can be otherwise, considering the initial-terminal rules for pronunciation in Putonghua.

    • SamotsvetyVIA [any]@hexbear.net
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      10 days ago

      The advice is meant for the majority of phonetic-semantic characters, which is 80% of the language. It requires a good base, of course, so it’d be applied in middle-school level and up.

      Your example is equivalent to saying you don’t know how to pronounce “baa” because you know the letter “a” but not the “b”. If you know 冫 then you know 冰.

      • Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 days ago

        Okay, so,what’s the rule for picking the right components? Sounds like this is the case of ‘baa’ being pronounced like ‘aa’, so the knowledge of how to pronounce ‘b’ doesn’t help, and even if you knew the pronunciation of ‘aa’, you would still need to make a guess.