What do you think about pinyin?!

[SassybutSweet]

Some feel that pinyin is not as effective or as traditional as the characters!!! But I find it easier to learn pinyin then the characters!! What I want to know is, which one would you recommened for someone who is just learning the written language of Mandarin!! Would you say that the characters would be easier and more effective?! Or would pinyin be easier and more effective?! Can anyone help me out?!! And whats the differance between the characters and pinyin?! Besides the fact that one is alphabet and one is characters(sorry it's a lack of a better word!!) I thank you for any help you can provide!!!

[sfr@rcn.com]

In a way, you're talking apples and oranges here. If you want to learn to read Chinese, you need to learn hanzi (the characters). Which characters--simplified or traditional? That depends on where you're going or whose newspapers and websites you're reading. Simplified for China, traditional or a mix of simplified and traditional everywhere else.

These characters are pronounced differently in different Chinese languages--Cantonese, guo yu, etc. Pinyin is China's way to tell you how to pronounce the characters. Taiwan uses another system that's more difficult for English speakers to learn because it's not based on the Roman alphabet. If you are learning from books instead of through conversation, you need something that will tell you how to pronounce the words or you'll never be able to speak them.

If you are studying primarily conversation, you also need pinyin or another transcription system to write down the words you don't know for looking up later in a dictionary.

However, you have to be careful: pinyin looks like it is rendering the sounds accurately, but it isn't. If you want to learn to speak, learn it from a native Chinese speaker who comes from a province whose accent you like.

Hope this helps.

Sandra

[beirne]

The characters are harder but more effective if you want to fully learn Chinese. I concentrated on pinyin in my first two years of study and only learned characters incidentally. I went to China and got by with the few characters I knew, since street signs and the like tend to be in Pinyin. It got annoying being illiterate, though, so I have since started learning the characters. Pinyin is only used in educational materials and signs. No one uses it for regular writing. If your only interest is the spoken language then it is sufficient, but if you want to do any useful reading then learn the characters.