Okay, so,what's the rule for picking the right components? Sounds like this is the case of 'baa' being pronounced like 'aa', so the knowledge of how to pronounce 'b' doesn't help, and even if you knew the pronunciation of 'aa', you would still need to make a guess.

[–] SamotsvetyVIA@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was just looking at this rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C7%92u_bi%C4%81n_d%C3%BA_bi%C4%81n

Usually you'd rely on educated guesswork like this - and in many cases the character isn't pronounced exactly the same because of drift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Sound_change), but Chinese isn't as precise as many people make it out to be: "When one encounters such a two-part character and does not know its exact pronunciation, one may take one of the parts as the phonetic indicator. For example, reading 詣 (pinyin: yì) as zhǐ because its "side" 旨 is pronounced as such. Some of this kind of "folk reading" have become acceptable over time – listed in dictionaries as alternative pronunciations, or simply become the common reading. For example, people read the character 町 ting in 西門町 (Ximending) as if it were 丁 ding".

[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Apologies, but do we agree that this is much less reliable and clear than what relevant languages (some more than others - Russian, for example, is much less ambiguous in this regard) have?

[–] SamotsvetyVIA@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago

yes