Ep B: Bopomofo ㄅㄆㄇㄈ
(想聽2021年1月15日的節目可以點開上面音符圖案的檔案 If you'd like to listen to the original 1/15/2021 episode, please click on the above music note to play the file)
A lot of people all over the world learn Chinese writing, native language learners and second language learners alike. Most of them use some form of Romanization pinyin to start learning, but there's only one place in the world that uses a special phonetic alphabet for learning Chinese, can you guess where it is? Of course it's Taiwan! Not only does Taiwan use traditional/standard Chinese characters (more complicated than their simplified counterparts), but Taiwan's Chinese education system has maintained use of a Chinese phonetic alphabet that was put in place over 100 years ago. Of course, the first "letter" of this alphabet is ㄅ, which is written bo in pinyin, so the ㄅㄆㄇㄈ system is the topic of our B episode! (Remember to look at the bottom of the post for the song chords!)
世界上到處都有人在學漢字，包含母語學習者還有第二語言學習者都一樣．開始學漢字時，大多數的人都用某種形式的羅馬拼音，但只有一個地方使用獨一無二的語音字母系統學習中文－－你能猜是哪裡嗎？答案當然就是台灣啊！台灣不僅使用繁體／整體漢字（台灣的比簡體字複雜多了），而且台灣的中文教育一直使用這個１００年前創造的中文注音字母系統．當然的，這個字母系統的第一個字母就是「ㄅ」而「ㄅ」的漢語拼音法是ｂｏ，因此ㄅㄆㄇㄈ系統成為了我們第二集Ｂ開頭的題目！（記得看網頁最下面的地方就可以找到歌曲的和絃囉！）
Here are the lyrics:
Here in Taiwan 在台灣這裡
We write Chinese 我們寫中文
With characters 用文字
That aren't so easy 不太容易
And that is why 所以因此
We all here know 我們這裡的人都知道
That before you learn characters 在開始學文字前
Learnㄅㄆㄇㄈ (bo po mo fo) 要學ㄅㄆㄇㄈ
ㄅㄆㄇㄈ (bo po mo fo) ㄅㄆㄇㄈ
It's a special code 是一個特殊的密碼/代碼
To write the sounds 用於在寫出那些聲音
For words we know 代表我們知道的單詞
Characters are hard 文字很難
They take years to know 要花好幾年才能學會
So we have a phonetic system 所以我們有一個注音系統
With 37 letters 包含37字母
Called ㄅㄆㄇㄈ (bo po mo fo) 叫做ㄅㄆㄇㄈ
ㄅㄆㄇㄈ (bo po mo fo)
ㄉㄊㄋㄌ (de te ne le)
ㄍㄎㄏㄐㄑㄒ (ge ke he ji qi xi)
ㄓㄔㄕㄖ (zhi chi shi ri)
ㄗㄘㄙㄧㄨㄩ (zi ci si yi wu yu)
ㄚㄛㄜㄝ (a o e ie)
ㄞㄟ (ai ei)
ㄠㄡㄢㄣㄤㄥㄦ (ao ou an en ang eng er)
ㄅㄆㄇㄈ (bo po mo fo) ㄅㄆㄇㄈ
It's a special code 是一個特殊的密碼/代碼
To write the sounds 用於在寫出那些聲音
For words we know 代表我們知道的單詞
Characters are hard 文字很難
They take years to know 要花好幾年才能學會
So we have a phonetic system 所以我們有一個注音系統
With 37 letters 包含37字母
Called ㄅㄆㄇㄈ (bo po mo fo) 叫做ㄅㄆㄇㄈ
