The closest direct English translation for nimen is probably the US Southern colloquialism "y'all", as both directly expresse the collective you.
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Except of course that "y'all" is used by speakers of that dialect in the singular as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27all)
. I also do not think it is appropriate to use a rather folksy regionalism to translate what is perfectly standard Mandarin grammar. Would anyone suggest that vous in a speech by the President of France should be translated as "y'all"?
Romanisation of Chinese in wiki entries.
1. Please don't mess with the formatting of Pinyin if you don't know how to type letters with tone-marks, or your computer system is not set up to support them.
2. Don't introduce capitalisation in the middle of words to show syllable boundaries. It is obsolete nowadays, and, more importantly, it will create false links within the wiki. e.g. Type jiānghú, or jianghu (though omitting tone indicators is deprecated), but not Jiang Hu.
3. Don't introduce apostrophes into Chinese words (e.g. T'ang Dynasty or Ts'ao Ts'ao). It is obsolete, and suggests the Punctuation Shaker has been used. Don't use hyphens to separate syllables either.
Edited by Mercy
This article is wrong about Mardarin and the Japanese Ranguage trope. Many Mandarin accents contain the retroflex approximant (/ɻ/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet), an r sound also used in several American English dialects; many Mandarin speakers can distinguish r's and l's.
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Yes, that is correct. Example it is obvious to a native speaker that Lan (lousy) and Ran (messy) sounds different totally. When speaking that: Ni Hen (You are very) Lan (lousy), Ran (messy). To almost most, if not all native speaker. Its is very obvious that different in sound and hence meaning.
Also to add on not all hanyu pingying letters correspond to the equivalent of English letters in sound. Eg the surname Yang. Most non speaker pronounce it as similar to japanese currency Yen while speaker will pronounce it similar to Ya-ang in one sound.
As a side note. Non Japanese speaker pronounce the japanese name Moe as Moe one sound) instead of Mo-e (like:Mo-eh)(two sound), I heard it on international stage: the 2010 youth Olympics.... Yeah
The L/R thing was annoying me too. Reading the above posts emboldened me to try to amend the article to the best of my knowledge: Mandarin speakers don't have any trouble distinguishing L and R, but may have difficulty pronouncing them in consonant clusters.
Perhaps someone should add a section about characters with multiple pronounciations. I guess that would give people some confusion.