My Opinion on Pinyin in Learning Chinese

To whom it might concern,

First, I want you to know this is just for reference, as I'm not professional at all.

For Chinese, probably Pinyin is the counterpart of your phonetic symbol. It helps you to pronounce it in Mandarin, an official standard spoken language of China implemented in 1956, so that all Chinese people can understand. Mandarin’s history is not long, while character is a nationwide writing system we start to use about 2200 years ago. We hadn't unified the spoken languages until PRC formulated the rule of Putonghua, namely Mandarin. Even now there are thousands of dialects in China, and I can tell if one person is from a different area of my home city just by his speaking way. I've lived in Fujian Province for four years, but I can only speak the simplest words of local spoken language like "sorry" or "thanks". Often I say to my roommate who speaks Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese:" If you were born in Europe instead of China, you probably speak French, English and German."

My opinion about Pinyin and Chinese characters is that if you just want to visit<strike>ing</strike> China instead of really learning Chinese, Pinyin would be adequate. Otherwise, you should deal with both of them, as I learn pronunciation and words together when I study English. I know it's not easy, because English and Chinese are very different. English words are alphabetic, while Chinese characters are ideographic. Despite that, I think alphabetic is the easier way to start. I remember when I was in kindergarten, my Chinese teacher taught Pinyin <strike>at</strike> in the first few weeks before we started to learn characters. Over all, my suggestion is: Maybe you can write in characters and use Google Translate Site to make them display in Pinyin to know how they're pronounced. We barely write in Pinyin, <strike>or else</strike> so it will be inconvenient <strike>as</strike> if you write in phonetic symbols.

Yours sincerely
Yuxi



Great job!!! Very interesting post.