THE UNIFIED PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING CHINESE LANGUAGES

ABSTRACT

In order to preserve distinctive cultures, people anxiously figure out writing systems of their languages as recording tools. Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka languages are three major and the most popular dialects of Han languages spoken in Chinese society. Their writing systems are all in Han characters. Various and independent phonetic transcriptions have been thus developed to be as the mapping mechanisms between Chinese mother tongue languages and Han characters. For teaching and learning facilitation purposes, we really require a convenient phonetic transcription system between daily Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka to speed Han characters data processing applications. The Roman spelling system is a universal tool that owns the one and only one spelling rule. By studying and analyzing the Roman spelling system, we have disclosed that 4135 Romanized phonetic transcriptions can be adequately applied to handle Han characters’ mappings of Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka spoken dialects. In this paper, we propose a minimal perfect hashing function to process unified 4135 Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka Romanized phonetic transcriptions to their corresponding Han characters simultaneously. The unified phonetic transcription can be used to promote Chinese mother tongue languages applications and developments. Furthermore, it can be applied as a mechanism to popularize digital learning and teaching of Chinese mother tongue languages.