One of the main reasons for starting Mandarin Radio was to share our metadata in Roman characters. That is, the Song Title and Artist Name that appears in most players.
When we first started back in 2002, almost all Chinese music radio and Chinese music websites used only Hanzi (Chinese characters). Go figure!
These days, many songs on YouTube have Western (Roman) characters use the translated song titles. But it’s still a mixed bag.
Mandarin Radio is primarily intended for those who do not read Chinese. As a music discovery platform, I am dedicated to helping our listeners know what they are hearing.
I plan to publish the contents of our playlists.
As of now the plan is to list songs in the following manner:
English Song Title: English Title
Chinese Song Title*: Hanzi Title (Pinyin Title)
Artist English Name: (If one exists)
Artist Chinese Name*: Hanzi Name (Pinyin Name)
*Artists whose main influence is in mainland China and their song titles will be shown in simplified Chinese characters. All others will be in traditional Chinese characters.
That might look something like this:
English Song Title: Cloudy Day
Chinese Song Title: 陰天 (Yīn tiān)
Artist English Name: Karen Mok
Artist Chinese Name: (Mòwénwèi) 莫文蔚
Note that often the English title is VERY different from actual Mandarin title. Where conflict exists, we’ll us the English title from reputable sources like iTunes and/or videos posted by the record companies. Otherwise we use Google Translate to get the English title. If that translation is weird, I’ll try to convey the meaning as best I can with my limited Mandarin. If you see something that is wrong, please let me know.
Ideally all of our pinyin will have tonal indicators.
English Artist Name: It is perplexing that so many artists use English names, yet almost no Mandarin speakers seem aware of them. For example Karen Mok. Her name is all over her CD covers (see above) and posters for her shows. Yet ask a Mandarin speaker if they like “Karen Mok” and they will stare back blankly. Then ask them if they know “Mo Wen Wei”, and suddenly you’re speaking their language! What’s odd is that there does not seem to be a huge push to market Chinese singers to Western audiences so the purpose of hanging their branding on an English name that their fans don’t acknowledge is . . . odd.
When there is no English name indicated or if it seems like it is nearly unused, we simply go with the Pinyin.
What the heck is Pinyin?
Pinyin is the accepted method of transliteration of Chinese to English (or Roman) characters. It replaced an earlier (and less accurate) convention called Wade-Giles.
Here’s an interesting fact about these two systems that has caused some confusion among non-Chinese, but probably MORE confusion for Chinese who travel abroad.
北京 is what we now know as Beijing. This is a Pinyin transliteration (the proper pinyin is Běijīng).
Though for years the English name of this city was Peking – YES it is the SAME place!
The old system of transliteration produced “Peking” from 北京.
Our Taiwanese friends tell us that there is an even more accurate phonetic system commonly called Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) (but formally Zhuyin). This system uses an entirely new set of characters to accurately represent all the sounds used in Mandarin (only 37 of them!) Plus 4 tones. It is used in Taiwan to teach children to read before they recognize enough characters. This seems pretty similar to Hiragana and Katakana for Japanese. Though Hiragana and Katakana are an integral part of all written Japanese. Bopomofo is not used in standard written Mandarin though apparently it is used to sort words in Mandarin dictionaries and for computer input. Below is a bopomofo keyboard from DSI Keyboards
