US post-secondary enrollments in foreign languages and the position of Mandarin

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graphs showing the enrollments of Japanese and Mandarin over time, with Italian thrown in by way of comparisonFrom the way the U.S. media talk about the boom in Mandarin classes, it’s easy to get the impression that Mandarin is about to become the most studied language in the United States. So I offer the following overdue reality check.

The data come from the results of a large survey of foreign-language enrollments in U.S. post-secondary schools. The survey was conducted by the Modern Language Association. I started work on this post when the results were released in November 2007; but, well, I got distracted.

This post has lots of tables and figures, so for those who don’t want to scan through everything I offer some basic points up front.

  • Spanish has more enrollments than all other foreign languages put together.
  • By far the biggest enrollment boom since 1990 has not been for Mandarin but for American Sign Language.
  • The boom in enrollments in Arabic also surpasses that for Mandarin.
  • Mandarin is indeed growing in popularity — but in recent years only at the undergraduate level.
  • Japanese continues to be more popular than Mandarin, though by an ever-smaller margin.
  • Mandarin is the seventh most studied foreign language in U.S. post-secondary schools, behind Spanish (which leads Mandarin by a ratio of 16:1), French, German, American Sign Language, Italian, and Japanese.
  • Relatively speaking, enrollments in foreign languages are much lower than they were 30 years ago.

A few summary remarks of my own:

  • I don’t expect the high growth rates for Mandarin to continue for many more years unless the programs are dumbed down (in which case they wouldn’t count for much) or Pinyin gains a much more prominent role in Mandarin pedagogy (and not just at the introductory level). The difficulties of Chinese characters will help keep numbers down, as will the eventual realization that learning Mandarin isn’t an easy ticket to riches (or even a ticket to riches at all).
  • Japanese received a big boost in the 1980s, when the media cranked out story after story about the power of Japan’s rising economy and the need to learn the language. Yet Japanese didn’t become the next big world language. I predict a similar path for Mandarin.
  • A high percentage of those taking Mandarin classes in U.S. high schools are students who are both ethnically Chinese and already familiar with the language. The MLA didn’t provide figures on that for post-secondary students. But I would be surprised if such “heritage” students don’t represent a higher percentage of those in Mandarin language courses than heritage students in most other language classes.

OK, now on to some details.

Look below at the growth for American Sign Language since 1990. If Mandarin had had that sort of growth (4,820 percent!) the pundits would no doubt be telling us that the Chinese had already taken over the planet and were going to rule the entire galaxy within the next decade. (And don’t get me started about the supposed Mandarin in Serenity/Firefly.) But American Sign Language just doesn’t seem to get the same sort of respect, despite the fact that it still has more than 50 percent more enrollments than Mandarin. Arabic, which has also had a much faster growth rate than that of Mandarin, hasn’t received the same level of hype either.

Growth in Enrollments: in declining order of growth from 1990 to 2006

Enrollments 1990 2006 % Growth 2002-06 % Growth 1990-2006
American Sign Language 1,602 78,829 29.7 4820.7
Arabic 3,475 23,974 126.5 589.9
Korean 2,286 7,145 37.1 212.6
Mandarin 19,490 51,582 51.0 164.7
Hebrew 12,995 23,752 4.2 82.8
Portuguese 6,211 10,267 22.4 65.3
Italian 49,699 78,368 22.6 57.7
Spanish 533,944 822,985 10.3 54.1
Japanese 45,717 66,605 27.5 45.7
French 272,472 206,426 2.2 -24.2
German 133,348 94,264 3.5 -29.3
Russian 44,626 24,845 3.9 -44.3
Total 1,125,865 1,489,042 12.7 32.3

Change in enrollments over time: in declining order of total enrollment for 2006

Change between Surveys 1995-98 1998-2002 2002-06
Spanish 8.3% 13.7% 10.3%
French -3.1% 1.5% 2.2%
German -7.5% 2.3% 3.5%
American Sign Language 165.3% 432.2% 29.7%
Italian 12.6% 29.6% 22.6%
Japanese -3.5% 21.1% 27.5%
Mandarin 7.5% 20.0% 51.0%
Russian -3.8% 0.5% 3.9%
Arabic 23.9% 92.3% 126.5%
Hebrew * 20.6% 44.0% 4.2%
Portuguese 6.0% 21.1% 22.4%
Korean 34.0% 16.3% 37.1%
Total 5.0% 16.6% 12.7%

* Modern and Biblical Hebrew combined

Below: Russian may not have the top number of enrollments, but it certainly has some motivated students, given the high numbers of them in advanced courses.

Enrollments in Introductory-Level Courses vs. Enrollments in Advanced-Level Courses

Intro Enr. Advanced Enr. Total Enrollment Ratio of Intro Enr. to Advanced Enr.
Russian 17,527 6,569 24,096 2.67:1
Portuguese 7,387 2,422 9,809 3.05:1
German 72,434 18,758 91,192 3.86:1
French 160,736 40,927 201,663 3.93:1
Korean 5,511 1,397 6,908 3.94:1
Greek, Ancient 13,250 3,176 16,426 4.17:1
Mandarin 41,193 9,262 50,455 4.45:1
Spanish 669,432 142,602 812,034 4.69:1
Japanese 55,161 10,585 65,746 5.21:1
Latin 26,787 4,383 31,170 6.11:1
Hebrew, Modern 7,665 1,250 8,915 6.13:1
Arabic 20,571 2,463 23,034 8.35:1
Italian 69,757 7,593 77,350 9.19:1
Hebrew, Biblical 7,854 705 8,559 11.14:1
American Sign Language 72,694 5,249 77,943 13.85:1
Other languages 27,836 3,478 31,314 8.00:1
Total 1,275,795 260,819 1,536,614 4.89:1

One thing I find particularly troubling is that the number of graduate students studying Mandarin has fallen. (Please click on the link in the previous sentence, since the relevant table is too wide to fit on this page.) The much-ballyhooed but also much-deserved increase in students studying Mandarin has all been at the undergraduate level. Given that the grad enrollment as a percentage of total enrollment for Mandarin is about the same as that for French (2.63 percent and 2.73 percent, respectively) it might appear that Mandarin has simply reached a “normal” ratio in this regard. But native speakers of English generally need much more time to master Mandarin than to master French. Simply put, four years, say, of post-secondary study of French provides students with a much greater level of fluency than four years of post-secondary study of Mandarin.

Also, there is a great deal more work that needs to be done in terms of translations from Mandarin. I do not at all mean to belittle the work being done in French — or in any other language. In fact it pains me that the MLA’s list of languages being studied included neither Old French nor Provençal, both of which I have studied and love dearly. I just mean that Mandarin has historically been underrepresented in U.S. universities given the number of speakers it has and its body of texts that have not yet been translated into English. U.S. universities need to be producing many more qualified grad students who can handle this specialized work. And right now, unfortunately, that’s not happening.

Post-Secondary Enrollments in Select Sino-Tibetan Languages and Classical Japanese: 2002, 2006

Two-Year Colleges Undergrad Programs Grad Programs Total
Language 2002 2006 2002 2006 2002 2006 2002 2006
Cantonese 47 96 128 82 5 0 180 178
Literary Sinitic 0 0 56 101 18 12 74 113
Japanese, Classical 0 0 8 23 11 7 19 30
Taiwanese 0 0 34 21 13 0 47 21
Tibetan 0 0 43 56 35 64 78 120
Tibetan, Classical 0 0 8 11 20 33 28 44

The figures in the table above are probably too low. Literary Sinitic (“classical Chinese”) is probably especially underrepresented because often too little differentiation is given between it and modern standard Mandarin. But at least the numbers can provide minimum figures.

Enrollments in Introductory Classes: 2-Year Schools vs. 4-Year Schools

Language Ratio of Intro Enr. in 2-Year Schools to Intro Enr. in 4-Year Schools
Greek, Ancient 0.00:1
Hebrew, Biblical 0.01:1
Latin 0.04:1
Hebrew, Modern 0.07:1
Portuguese 0.11:1
Russian 0.15:1
German 0.20:1
Italian 0.23:1
French 0.24:1
Arabic 0.26:1
Mandarin 0.26:1
Korean 0.28:1
Japanese 0.39:1
Spanish 0.49:1
American Sign Language 1.47:1
Other languages 0.24:1

American Sign Language sticks out here as the only language that more people take at the introductory level at junior colleges than at universities. Roughly twice as many people take introductory Spanish in universities as at junior colleges. Introductory Japanese classes are surprisingly popular at the two-year college level, well above the level for introductory Mandarin, though Mandarin is not unpopular itself.

Course Enrollments in Some Asian and Pacific Languages

Language 1998 2002 2006 % Change 2002–06
Hindi/Urdu 1314 2009 2683 33.55
Vietnamese 899 2236 2485 11.14
Tagalog/Filipino 794 1142 1569 37.39
Sanskrit 363 487 607 24.64
Hmong 15 283 402 42.05
Thai 272 330 307 -6.97
Indonesian 223 225 301 33.78
Samoan 207 201 280 39.30
Cantonese 39 180 178 -1.11
Tibetan 80 78 120 53.85
Literary Sinitic 32 74 113 52.70
Pashto – 14 103 635.71
Punjabi 32 99 103 4.04
Total 4270 7358 9251 25.73

Although more U.S. postsecondary students are studying languages other than English than ever before, that’s unfortunately not because U.S. students as a whole have finally embraced the study of languages. Rather, there are simply more students now. Relatively speaking, enrollments in foreign languages are much lower than they were 30 years ago.

graph showing that present US postsecondary enrollment in foreign languages is relatively much lower than it was in in the 1960s

If “ancient” foreign languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek were included in the graph, the imbalance between the 1960s and the present in foreign-language enrollments would be even greater.

source: Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2006 (PDF), MLA, November 13, 2007

updating Karlgren: a forthcoming reference book

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The University of Hawai`i Press will be releasing another work in its groundbreaking ABC Chinese Dictionary Series, which is responsible for my favorite Mandarin-English dictionary, the Pinyin-ordered ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, edited by John DeFrancis.

The new work, which will be released in December 2008, is Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa, by Axel Schuessler.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Although long out of date, Bernard Karlgren’s (1957) remains the most convenient work for looking up Middle Chinese (ca. A.D. 600) and Old Chinese (before 200 B.C.) reconstructions of all graphs that occur in literature from the beginning of writing (ca. 1250 B.C.) down to the third century B.C. In the present volume, Axel Schuessler provides a more current reconstruction of Old Chinese, limiting it, as far as possible, to those post-Karlgrenian phonological features of Old Chinese that enjoy some consensus among today’s investigators. At the same time, the updating of the material disregards more speculative theories and proposals. Schuessler refers to these minimal forms as “Minimal Old Chinese” (OCM). He bases OCM on Baxter’s 1992 reconstructions but with some changes, mostly notational. In keeping with its minimal aspect, the OCM forms are kept as simple as possible and transcribed in an equally simple notation. Some issues in Old Chinese phonology still await clarification; hence interpolations and proposals of limited currency appear in this update.

Karlgren’s Middle Chinese reconstructions, as emended by Li Fang-kuei, are widely cited as points of reference for historical forms of Chinese as well as dialects. This emended Middle Chinese is also supplied by Schuessler. Another important addition to Karlgren’s work is an intermediate layer midway between the Old and Middle Chinese periods known as “Later Han Chinese” (ca. second century A.D.) The additional layer makes this volume a useful resource for those working on Han sources, especially poetry.

This book is intended as a “companion” to the original Grammata Serica Recensa and therefore does not repeat other information provided there. Matters such as English glosses and references to the earliest occurrence of a graph can be looked up in Grammata Serica Recensa itself or in other relevant dictionaries. The great accomplishment of this companion volume is to update an essential reference and thereby fulfill the need for an accessible and user-friendly source for citing the various historically reconstructed stages of Chinese.

85 percent of Han in China have two-syllable given names: report

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Just how common are monosyllabic given names in China? I’ve seen lots of wild guesses, which generally range from about one-quarter to one-half (?!) of the population. Zhang et al., however, give the following figures:

91.06% Chinese have three-character names and only 8.34% have two-character names. People with four characters or more only constitute 0.6% of the population.

This was based on a database of 1,644,911 names in China.

According to a larger survey last year in the PRC, however, 14.22 percent of Han people in China have given names that are monosyllabic … and thus are written with a single Chinese character. On the other hand, 85.61 percent of Han people in China have full names written with exactly three Chinese characters, according to the report released by the National Citizen Identity Information Center, an organization with ties to China’s Ministry of Public Security. (It thus seems likely they have access to especially good data.)

Since the source material is unclear on what is meant by names written with three Chinese characters, it’s possible that some people in the second group have disyllabic family names and monosyllabic given names; but that number is likely to be close to statistically insignificant, given the relative paucity of monosyllabic given names and the outright rarity of disyllabic family names. (Only 0.02 percent of those in Zhang et al.‘s name list had disyllabic family names.)

The sum of 14.22 and 85.61 is 99.83, which leaves 0.17 percent of those in China classified as Han having names that are at least four syllables long and so take at least four Chinese characters to write.

According to a report published last December but which I’m just now getting around to writing about, nearly one thousand names in China are written with at least ten Chinese characters. The news story, alas, does not give any of these names; but it does provide a breakdown of the numbers:

10 characters: 594 names
11 characters: 272 names
12 characters: 94 names
13 characters: 33 names
14 characters: 5 names
15 characters: 1 name

A total of 97 percent of those 999 people live in the predominantly non-Han Chinese region of Xinjiang, which likely indicates that they have non-Han names that are being forced into forms that fit procrustean Mandarinized syllables.

A report from Nanjing states that 309 of the city’s 6 million people have names that take more than four Chinese characters to write.

PRC authorities have proposed limiting given names to two syllables and family names to four syllables (for rare cases in which a child receives a disyllabic family name from both parents).

As for Taiwan, monosyllabic given names are much rarer here than in China. My guess would be about 2 percent. This could probably be worked out from Chih-Hao Tsai’s list of Chinese names; but right now I don’t have the time.

On the other hand, China’s public is being urged to embrace new disyllabic family names, largely because the relative paucity of surnames ensures many, many people in China share common names.

Recent demographic surveys indicate there are about 1,600 surnames, with only 100 or so being frequently used, among Chinese nationals, which means many people share a name. For example, nearly 300,000 people, male and female, use the same common name of Zhang Wei, the statistics show.

The top 1,600 U.S. surnames don’t even cover half of the population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, whose list of surnames found in the United States contains more than 88,000 entries.

sources:

Further reading:

Taiwan personal names: a frequency list

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Imagine taking everyone in the United States with the family name of Johnson, Williams, Jones, Brown, Davis, Miller, Wilson, Moore, Taylor, or Anderson … and giving them all the new family name of “Smith.” Then add to the Smiths everyone surnamed Thomas, Jackson, White, Harris, Martin, Thompson, Garcia, Martinez, Robinson, Clark, Rodriguez, Lewis, Lee, Walker, Hall, Allen, Young, Hernandez, King, Wright, and Lopez. Those are, in descending order beginning with Smith, the 32 most common family names in the United States. It takes all of those names together to reach the same frequency that the name “Chen” (Hoklo: Tân) has in Taiwan.

Chen covers 10.93 percent of the population here, according to figures released by Chih-Hao Tsai based on the recent release of the names of the 81,422 people who took Taiwan’s college entrance exam this year.

By way of additional contrast, Smith, the most common family name in the United States, covers just 1.00 percent of the population there.

In Taiwan, the 10 most common family names cover half (50.22 percent) of the population. Covering the same percentage in the United States requires the top 1,742 names there. And covering the same percentage as Taiwan’s top 25 names (74.17 percent) requires America’s top 13,425 surnames.

So if you’re just getting started in Mandarin, consider that you’ll get a lot of mileage out of memorizing the tones for the top ten names.

family name (Mandarin form) spelling usually seen in Taiwan percent of total cumulative percentage
Chén Chen 10.93% 10.93%
Lín Lin 8.36% 19.29%
Huáng Huang 6.06% 25.35%
Zhāng Chang 5.39% 30.74%
Lǐ Li, Lee 5.20% 35.94%
Wáng Wang 4.20% 40.14%
Wú Wu 4.03% 44.17%
Liú Liu 3.18% 47.36%
Cài Tsai 2.86% 50.22%
Yáng Yang 2.64% 52.86%
Xǔ Hsu 2.32% 55.18%
Zhèng Cheng 1.86% 57.05%
Xiè Hsieh 1.77% 58.82%
Qiū Chiu 1.50% 60.32%
Guō Kuo 1.48% 61.79%
Zēng Tseng 1.45% 63.24%
Hóng Hung 1.40% 64.64%
Liào Liao 1.38% 66.02%
Xú Hsu 1.33% 67.35%
Lài Lai 1.32% 68.66%
Zhōu Chou 1.24% 69.90%
Yè Yeh 1.18% 71.08%
Sū Su 1.17% 72.25%
Jiāng Chiang 0.97% 73.22%
Lǚ Lu 0.94% 74.17%

For those wanting the Taiwanese (Hoklo) forms of these names, see Tailingua’s list of Common Family Names in Taiwan.

On the other hand, common given names have much greater variety in Taiwan than in America, especially in the case of males. In the United States the top 10 names for males cover 23.185 percent of the male population, and the top 10 names for females cover 10.703 percent of the population. In Taiwan, however, the top 10 given names (male and female together) cover just 1.49 percent of the population.

sources:

further reading:

foregoing fours forestalls misfortune: government in action

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Eddie Murphy's paranoid character of Kit Ramsey, from the movie 'Bowfinger'
Kit: The letter K appears in this script 1,456 times. That’s perfectly divisible by 3.
Freddy: So what? So what you saying?
Kit: What am I saying? KKK appears in this script 486 times!

–from Bowfinger

Webmaster’s note: I just came across this old post, which for some reason I failed to put online half a year ago, back when it was actually news. So when I refer to the government here, that means the Chen administration, not the current one of Ma Ying-jeou — not that it would probably make any difference on this issue. This is one change the Ma administration doesn’t seem interested in rescinding. And, anyway, with China starting the Olympics ceremony tonight at 8 p.m. — that’s 08/08/08 at 8:00 (or is the time supposed to be 8:08:08?) — a number-related post doesn’t seem out of order.

The deadly number four is in the news again. Eliminating fours from Taiwan license plates wasn’t enough, as millions of people in Taiwan still have the potentially life-threatening burden of one or more fours in their official ID no.

In Mandarin, the word for “four” (sì) sounds similar but not identical to the word for “die/death” (sǐ). In Taiwanese, too, the words are similar but not identical sounding.

So the government has decided to pander to the superstitious treat the issue with appropriate cultural sensitivity. Removing 4 entirely from Taiwan’s two-letter, eight-digit ID numbers would affect too many IDs, officials decided, so at least one 4 can remain — but never in the final position. (The latter restriction has been in force since 2000.)

Luckily, for those who need to have every last 4 removed from their ID number, help is at hand.

Let’s just hope that whatever massive amount of taxpayers’ money the government will have to spend on this, the figure won’t have an unlucky four in it, because then some people might start to question the wisdom of this project.

sources and further reading:

Taiwan Google searches: Hanyu Pinyin vs. Tongyong Pinyin

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Taiwan’s still official but probably-not-long-for-this-world romanization system for Mandarin is Tongyong Pinyin. Tongyong Pinyin, however, is basically unknown outside Taiwan and, in truth, very little known even within Taiwan. (And many of those — like me — who do know it don’t like it.) But still, it’s what the Chen administration forced into use on highway signs, within train stations, and on some other signage throughout the country. So there’s certain to be some interest for it here. But in Taiwan how does interest in it compare against interest in Hanyu Pinyin, use of the latter system being regarded as something close to a sign of the apocalypse among some Tongyong supporters? The new Google Insights provides some clues.

Here’s a relative look at Google searches from Taiwan in 2008 for the terms “漢語拼音” (Hanyu Pinyin) and “通用拼音” (Tongyong Pinyin).

In Taiwan, searches for Hanyu Pinyin have clearly been more popular this year.

What about in the longer term? Below is a chart from 2004 to the present. (The lines are a little different because in the long-term chart averages are by month; but the monthly averages probably give a clearer picture anyway.)

Again, interest in Hanyu Pinyin comes out on top — consistently — even in Taiwan.

Not surprisingly, in searches worldwide, Tongyong Pinyin basically doesn’t even register against Hanyu Pinyin, so great is the disparity.

If you’d like to run some searches on your own, note that Google Insights distinguishes between traditional and “simplified” Chinese characters, i.e., a search for “漢語拼音” will yield substantially different results than one for “汉语拼音”.

software for Shanghainese

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Professor Qián Nǎiróng (Qian Nairong / 錢乃榮) of Shanghai University has just issued free software to help with the writing of Shanghainese (上海话). People may now download the 1.3 MB zip file of the program.

Some examples:

shanghe 上海
shanghehhehho 上海闲/言话（上海话）
whangpugang 黄浦江
suzouhhu苏州河
shyti 事体（事情）
makshy 物事（东西）
bhakxiang 白相（玩）
dangbhang 打朋（开玩笑）
ghakbhangyhou 轧朋友（交朋友）
cakyhangxiang 出洋相（闹笑话，出丑）
linfhakqin 拎勿清(不能领会)
dhaojiangwhu 淘浆糊（混）
aoshaoxhin 拗造型（有意塑造姿态形象）
ghe 隑（靠）
kang 囥（藏）
yin 瀴（凉、冷）
dia 嗲
whakji 滑稽

The program offers two flavors of romanization. Here are some examples of the differences between the two styles:

New Folk Old Timers
makshy 物事（东西）
bhakxiang 白相（玩）
dangbhang 打朋（开玩笑）
ghakbhangyhou 轧朋友（交朋友）
cakyhangxiang 出洋相（闹笑话，出丑）
linfhakqin 拎勿清(不能领会) 		mekshy 物事（东西）
bhekxian 白相（玩）
danbhan 打朋（开玩笑）
ghakbhanyhou 轧朋友（交朋友）
cekyhanxian 出洋相（闹笑话，出丑）
linfhekqin 拎勿清(不能领会)

Here’s a brief story on this:

Xiànzài, wǒmen zài wǎngluò zhōng liáotiān de shíhou yuèláiyuè duō de péngyou dōu kāishǐ xǐhuan yòng Shànghǎihuà. Dànshì yǒushíhou shìbushì juéde xiǎng biǎodá dehuà bùzhīdào zěnme dǎ, nòng de yǒudiǎn bùlúnbùlèi ne? Xiànzài, yī ge kěyǐ qīngsōng dǎchū Shànghǎihuà de chéngxù chūlai le.

Jīngguò liǎng nián nǔlì, Shànghǎi dàxué Zhōngwénxì Qián Nǎiróng jiàoshòu jí tā de yánjiūshēng hé dādàng zhōngyú yú běnyuè wánchéng le Shànghǎihuà shūrùfǎ de zhìzuò. Zhíde guānzhù de shì, zhè tào shūrùfǎ hái bāokuò xīn-lǎo liǎng ge bǎnběn, 45 suì yǐshàng de lǎo Shànghǎi rénhé niánqīng yī dài de Shànghǎirén dōu kěyǐ zhǎodào zìjǐ de “dǎfǎ.”

Háishi tóngyàng 26 ge zìmǔ de jiànpán, 8 yuè 1 rì qǐ xiàzài le Shànghǎihuà shūrùfǎ zhīhòu, nín jiù kěyǐ tōngguò shūrù “linfhakqin” dǎchū “līn wù qīng,” shūrù “dhaojiangwhu” dǎchū “táo jiànghu” děng yuánzhī yuán wèi de Shànghǎihuà le. Zuótiān, jìzhě tíqián xiàzài dào gāi ruǎnjiàn. Ànzhào shǐyòng shuōmíng, yòng quánpīn de fāngshì chángshì shūrù “laoselaosy” zhèxiē zìmǔ, píngmù shàng, lìjí chūxiàn le “lǎo sānlǎo sì” (Shànghǎihuà, yìsi shì “màilǎo, chōng lǎochéng de yàngzi”).

Jùxī, yóuyú Shànghǎihuà yǔ Pǔtōnghuà de dúfǎ yǒusuǒbùtóng, suǒyǐ zài pīnyīn pīnxiě fāngshì shàng háishi xūyào shǐyòng shuōmíng de bāngzhù. Bǐrú jìzhě fāxiàn, fánshì yǔ Pǔtōnghuà shēngmǔ, yùnmǔ xiāngtóng de zì, zài Shànghǎihuà shūrùfǎ zhōng zuìzhōng yòng de háishi Pǔtōnghuà pīnyīn, bùtóng de zé cǎiyòng Shànghǎihuà shūrùfǎ de pīnxiě fāngshì. Rú “chénguāng” de “chén,” “huātou” de “tóu” dōu fāchéng zhuóyīn, Shànghǎihuà pīnyīn shūrùfǎ zhōng yàozài shēngmǔ zhōng jiā yī ge zìmǔ h, pīnchéng “shen,” “dhou;” fánshì rùshēng zì, zé zài pīnyīn hòu jiā zìmǔk, rú “báixiāng” de “bái” jiù pīnchéng bhek.

Bùguò, dàjiā bùyào juéde tài nán. Jìzhě fāxiàn, Shànghǎihuà shūrùfǎ yǔ Pǔtōnghuà de shūrùfǎ zuìdà xiāngtóng zhī chǔzài yú, zhǐyào liánxù shūrù shēngmǔ hé yùnmǔ jiù kěyǐ, bùxū shūrù shēngdiào. Cǐwài, Shànghǎihuà pīnyīn shūrù xìtǒng háiyǒu lèisì “zhìnéng” yōudiǎn, kěyòng suōlüè fāngshì bǎ cíyǔ pīnxiě chūlai.

Zhǔchí Shànghǎihuà shūrùfǎ kāifā de Shànghǎi dàxué Zhōngwénxì Qián Nǎiróng jiàoshòu gàosu jìzhě, zhè tào shūrùfǎ bùjǐn néng dǎchū Shànghǎihuà dà cídiǎn zhōng 15,000 duō ge cítiáo, érqiě hái néng yòng Shànghǎihuà pīnyīn dǎchū Shànghǎihuà zhōng shǐyòng zhe de, yǔ Pǔtōnghuà cíyì xiāngtóng dàn yǔyīn bùtóng de chángyòng cíyǔ. Rú “Huángpǔ Jiāng” shūrù “whangpugang” , “lǐxiǎng” zéshì lixiang děng, gòngjì 10,000 duō ge cítiáo.

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