Bopomofo
I think I like it better for representing all the sounds because it makes harder distinctions between things like the two -i's. It's also kinda like kana is in Japanese. Pinyin is leading me to trying to pronounce things too much like English where the sounds are sometimes not that similar. :-/
I think so. One is like ‘ee’ and the other is like ‘eh’.
it's all about your tongue. "retroflex" means your tongue is curled back to your soft palate, and "frontal" means it's almost touching the back of your front teeth
the "i" in "shi" sounds more like English "dirt" or "shirt" and but the one in "xi" sounds more like the "e" in Pete
I think I finally got this yesterday after trying a bunch of different ways. My mouth gets all pouched up and my tongue lets air past slightly at the front-ish of the palate. It’s still hard because my regular ‘sh’ is between that and the pinyin ‘x’.
as you practice and get more fluid with it, the movements of your tongue and mouth will become less exaggerated and you will learn how far you can cut corners to make it easier to move to the next sound while still sounding differentiable
Good! I just can’t fake it like I can a Spanish or German pronunciation.