chinese go terms

[SoDesuNe]

Hm, maybe there are different ways to teach chinese pronounciation but we started with Pinyin and there the tones were always assigned to specific letters. Weiqi e.g. is written wéiqí in Pinyin. The ´ show that these letters are pronounced using the second tone.
Putonghua is written: Pŭtōnghuà (I made a mistake with the tones in my post above). ˘ is the third tone, - is the first tone and ` is the fourth tone in Pinyin.

That way I used to think the tones should stand behind the letters which will be pronounced differently and not behind each syllable.

[Amelia]

I only know very little about mandarin, but I was taught to understand the tone as assigned to the whole syllable, even though it was written above one letter (I learned with pinyin as well).

[John Fairbairn]

Hm, maybe there are different ways to teach chinese pronounciation but we started with Pinyin and there the tones were always assigned to specific letters.

The way to think of it is that every Chinese syllable consists of a vowel sound (nb vowel sound, not vowel) and this may have some consonant sounds fore and aft.

The vowel sound can be a pure vowel or a vowel with a diphthong. In the latter case, the pinyin mark, if accents are used, goes over the main vowel, which may be the first (e.g. as in ei) or the second (as in ua), or the middle (as in uai). It may even go over a vowel sound not shown (to our ears), as in ui. But it's always the main vowel, and this is always predictable.

Where numbers are shown instead, the number is added at the end of the whole vowel sound and you just have to know which is the main vowel for pronunciation purposes.

Note that the tone mark shown does not necessarily represent the sound you will hear. Tones mutate according to the environment, usually in a regular, learnable way. Occasionally actual pronunciations are shown with tone marks, but the norm is to show what might be called the standard dictionary form for each syllable, the one regular exception being the neutral tone, which is often so marked, either with 0 or 5, or just by absence of any tone mark, but dictionaries vary here.

[Kanin]

Hm, maybe there are different ways to teach chinese pronounciation but we started with Pinyin and there the tones were always assigned to specific letters. Weiqi e.g. is written wéiqí in Pinyin. The ´ show that these letters are pronounced using the second tone.
Putonghua is written: Pŭtōnghuà (I made a mistake with the tones in my post above). ˘ is the third tone, - is the first tone and ` is the fourth tone in Pinyin.

That way I used to think the tones should stand behind the letters which will be pronounced differently and not behind each syllable.

The tones are officially assigned to the syllable's nucleus. When using diacritics to mark tone it is tradition to put them on top of the vowel symbolizing the nucleus. Whereas when you mark them with numbers you just put it at the end of the syllable. In any case, most Chinese people would just consider the tone to come with the syllable as a whole and not give nucleus and vowels any thought whatsoever. Please note that in some cases two letters can represent one vowel sound, and also be the nucleus. It is so in for instance wei2 where ei is one sound. In such cases where to put the diacritic is a matter of writing convention.

On Chinese go terms: There are many terms to be found in magazines and go books and a lot of borrowing has taken place between Japanese and Chinese. But in practice not so many terms are being used in real life discussion of games, and more importantly it seems to be very flexible when and how to use a term.

Sometimes Chinese go players even surprise each other with the way they use different terms. I have a friend who is a go pro and he will frequently say "this diagram" (zhe4tu3) when talking about a variation on a real board. This is equally strange in Chinese as in English as there are no diagrams on the real board and many other go players often react at his way of using the word. I'm guessing it is resulting from the fact that the only books he ever read since graduating high-school are go books, making his vocabulary a little skewered.

From a non-native speaker, but avid go player living in Shanghai. Cheers!

[jts]

That way I used to think the tones should stand behind the letters which will be pronounced differently and not behind each syllable.

JF and Kanin gave much more detailed replies, but in a nutshell - it's not the u or the e or the i that takes the second tone, it's wei! How can you give a tone to a letter without giving that tone to the whole syllable?

[SoDesuNe]

Thanks all for the clarification! It adds to my belief that starting (or even bothering at all) with Pinyin is not the ideal way to learn chinese.

[SmoothOper]

I have a book for learning Chinese. "Learn Chinese Through Song", it has the song and melody with pinyin and English, then some pages with the translation and characters. I wish there was a Go book like this. With the pinyin, English and characters plus some explanation of the translation and diagram in English, it would probably be popular amongst Chinese as well.