Youngfun wrote:OK, I'm sorry, you're right.
Now I wonder if there's any difference between 高级厨师 and 烹调大师。
I would say they are slightly different. 高級廚師 just means a "high-level chef", but a 烹調大師 would refer to an actual master, which IMHO is a bit higher. But now we're just splitting hair really.
Youngfun wrote:I've looked for it on Baidu (mainly websites from the Mainland) and again it seems that 烹饪大师 is usually used here instead of 烹调大师.
I wouldn't be surprised if different terms are used in Taiwan & mainland.
Youngfun wrote:About the Zhuyin Fuhao, I recognize that there could be some utility in it.
It uses fewer symbols to represent the same sound. Here at the college, when I meet a character in my book that I can't read and I write the pinyin above or on the side, sometimes I have not enough space, cause the pinyin for a character often occupies more space than the character itself.
While my Taiwanese classmates have much tidier books with zhuyin fuhao that occupied roughly the same space as the characters, so it's easier to transcribe the pronunciation between the lines of printed text.
Perhaps, but is that minor advantage worth learning Zhuyin? How often will you actually write Zhuyin next to characters?
Youngfun wrote:Another advantage (in the 90s) is that with zhuyin fuhao you can type a character with 2-3 keys (+1 for the tone), while with pinyin you can type as many as 6 keys (e.g. chuang).
But nowadays, the pinyin IMEs are far superior cause they are smarter, they can automatically detect the characters according to the compounds and the sentence.
While AFAIK zhuyin IMEs are still the primitive kind of "type the initial, the final, the tone and then select the character". Correct me if "smart" zhuyin IMEs do exist.
Agreed.
With Pinyin, I can type character by character, phrase by phrase or even a whole sentence. With Zhuyin you can only do character by character.
Youngfun wrote:According to other people, zhuyin fuhao are aestetically nicer when you mix them with the hanzi, because they have the same "imaginary square" format. But I think nowadays people are already accustomed to see Latin script mixed with hanzi.
But they do look better in vertical texts, IMHO.
Perhaps, but you aren't supposed to mix Zhuyin with Hanzi. Sometimes it's done in online chats but it's by no way an "official" usage. It's not like Hiragana and Katakana in Japanese or even Hangul in Korean.
In conclusion, none of the "advantages" of Zhuyin justify learning and using it unless you are doing it for fun.