Comparing Phonetic Annotation: Taiwan and Mainland Children's Books

[Jive Turkey]

It has been a while since I've crossed the border from Hong Kong into the mainland, and the HK$1100 visa fee for US passport holders discourages me from going to the bookstores in Shenzhen to find the answer to the question I have.

The question is this: In reading materials for children on the mainland, until what target reader age are materials annotated with Hanyu Pinyin? Second, at any given level, say from materials aimed at a primary 1 child all the way up to readers for a primary 6 child, about what percentage of the reading materials on the market are annotated with pinyin?

To give people who have never been to Taiwan an idea of where I am coming from on this, nearly all Taiwanese reading materials all the way up to the P6 level are annotated with Zhuyin Fuhao. It seems to me that it is easier to annotate dense text with zhuyin than with pinyin since in most of the pinyin annotated reading materials I've seen, not only does the pinyin need a line of space at least half as tall as the characters, but the characters themselves need to be spaced apart a good bit so that they appear with the right pinyin syllables. Here in Hong Kong, we only have a few pinyin annotated books in the shops since publishers haven't really put out many traditional character children's books with pinyin, and most Hong Kongers aren't interested in buying simplified character books for their kids. The books that we do have are P1-2 level.

So for people who are familiar with both systems, what are the densest materials you've seen that are annotated with pinyin? Anthing close to the density of the thick zhuyin annotated vernacular versions of Chinese classics that are popular in Taiwan? If there are really dense texts that are annotated with pinyin, are they popular?

[gato]

You can find pinyin-annotated books on online books like dangdang, but in practice, they are not that popular in the mainland and are probably mostly used by kindergartners or lower-grade elementary schools kids.

http://search.dangdang.com/search.php?catalog=&key=%C6%B4%D2%F4%B6%C1%CE%EF&SearchFromTop=1#Pub_top

拼音读物

In terms of textbooks, only first-grade textbooks have complete pinyin annotations. Starting with the second-grade textbooks, pinyin is only used for new vocabulary. See some pages from the People Education Press's edition of the first-grade 2nd semester and second-grade 1st semester Chinese texts below:

http://www.pep.com.cn/xiaoyu/jiaoshi/tbjxzy/kbjiaocai/tb1x/200902/t20090206_550516.htm

语文一年级下册

http://www.pep.com.cn/xiaoyu/jiaoshi/tbjxzy/kbjiaocai/xy2s/

语文二年级上册

You might also see pinyin annotation for classical Chinese work, like Confucius classics and Tang dynasty poems, which are intended to be used for memorization by kids, and not really for understanding.

http://product.dangdang.com/product.aspx?product_id=9220126&ref=search-0-A

孟子（注音版）/儿童经典诵读丛书

I know Taiwan has 《國語日報》, a newspaper for kids, that has zhuyin annotations, but you won't find anything similar in the mainland. Even newspapers and magazines for elementary school kids have no pinyin annotations.

http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/File:Guoyu_Ribao.JPG

《國語日報》頭版

[Jive Turkey]

Thanks for your post, Gato. You told me exactly what I wanted to know. Do you think there is any regional variation? I seem to remember reading a conference paper in a mainland book which indicated that in the wayward Canto speaking region, one of the PTH promotion measures has been more extensive use of HYPY. Has anyone been down that way and noticed any differences in the books on the shelves in the kids section of book shops? I've asked Chinese teachers in HK who have supposedly been trained to teach in PTH and are doing so in schools, but they seem more ignorant of how things are done outside HK than I am.