Pinyin or No Pinyin ?

[HashiriKata]

Hi,

I think that pinyin is handy when starting Chinese, but after a year or so learning the language, do you think it's still necessary to have pinyin text alongside Hanzi text ? I'm looking at a non-beginner textbook for Chinese and I'm inclined to tell the author to drop all pinyin except in the vocabulary lists. However, the problem is: Chinese text with pinyin, students would be drawn unduely towards pinyin. Chinese text without pinyin, some students would still themselves provide the text with pinyin. What do non-beginner learners of Chinese think/ prefer?

Thanks,

[HashiriKata]

By the way, the above question is not a question of choosing between hanzi & pinyin. It assumes that you're learning hanzi, and pinyin is provided only as an aid.

The other thing I need to make clear is: each lesson in the book is provided with a vocabulary list already annotated with pinyin, do you still want to see pinyin appearing again alongside the text itself?

[lau]

I guess it depends on a particular learner. I mean, for some looking a word up in a dictionary to find it's pronounciation is a way to learn it. for some, seeing a text with no pinyin results in not reading the text at all. but for a book for nice, hard working students in love with chinese language - definately no pinyin!

[devi9]

Pinyin alongside a text is bad news for me: I will not read the text. If we're talking workbooks, as long as the vocab list has pinyin that's enough for me. What book are you using? It seems strange to me that a more advanced book would have pinyin above/alongside the text.

[roddy]

I think a textbook at anything above beginner (maybe intermediate) level needs to reflect what the student is really going to encounter, so I'd say no pinyin - maybe in brackets on new words, but nothing else.

If the text in question is for reading practice, then I'd say certainly not. If it's a dialogue or the tapescript of a listening exercise though, then I guess it might be useful, and certainly won't harm the intended aims. In developing reading skills though I think it will be at best a distraction, and at worst a crutch.

Roddy

PS Oh and please please please make sure that they don't put Chinese / pinyin / English in line by line, and not on the same page if possible - nothing more annoying than badly laid-out textbooks where the student can 'accidentally' read a translation by flicking their eyes a couple of inches from where they are meant to be.

PPS Yes, I know there are more annoying things than that really. I just couldn't think of them.

Edited PPPS Here's a thought. When textbooks teach dialogues, shouldn't they be presented only in pinyin - textbooks should be as true to 'real-life' situations as possible (with allowances for level, obviously) and in a real life conversation you only hear the pronunciation - ie the pinyin. Giving the characters provides extra clues that won't be available in real life. . .

[Song You Shen]

I believe that having pinyin with hanzi is a good way to study. However, they should be on seperate pages. I find it very helpful to be able to quickly check if what I spoke was correct, or if I am missing one word. It also helps me with my tones. Since pinyin shows the tone marking, it is a quick reference in case I forget what the tone was. Without the pinyin there to provide correction, it would take a long time to see if I what I was reading/speaking was correct or not.

Youshen

[lau]

i studied from a book, where for book 2 they had tone marks above the characters in the text. it was as if the next step - book 1 had pinyin transcripts, while book 2 didn't. That is not a bad idea, I believe, because for me the tone is the first thing to disappear from my memory.

[nipponman]

I think that pinyin should only be used for words in which the author may find that the characters are too hard, or unknown to the student. But after a while, seeing things in English (pinyin) gets real old real fast.

[HashiriKata]

Thank you all for replying.

I'm sure many of you, like me, will find the pinyin in the book unduly intrusive, because it's everywhere. However, last night I was looking at many Chinese textbooks of a similar type published in the UK and I don't think that this author is the exception. I've also found a place in the book where the author wrote: "The text has taken into consideration the fact that some learners may have learned pinyin only."

So the book is intended for a wider market, and we just have to go along.

they had tone marks [without the pinyin'] above the characters in the text

This is the method I'd choose. It's not intrusive and a great help particularly for learners from non-tonal language background.

What book are you using?

It's not published yet. The publisher just asked me to give my view.

Cheers,

[snarfer]

I've been using the New Practical Chinese Reader for a couple months now. I am now on book two, which does not print Pinyin next to the characters, but does have tone marks. I often found myself covering up the pinyin in the first book when reading aloud. The tone marks are not as distracting though.

Personally I would be unlikely to purchase a text with pinyin next to characters, but certainly would not object to pinyin on another page. Another crucial factor would be the quality of the index.

[HashiriKata]

"The text has taken into consideration the fact that some learners may have learned pinyin only."

I'm still very curious by the assumption that there are non-beginning learners of Chinese who would not learn Chinese characters but rely solely on pinyin.

1. Can anyone therefore please let me know that you understand perfectly the following 2 sentences in pinyin but you don't learn and don't know Chinese characters in general?

Wǒ hěn xǐhuan Guìlín .Nàli fēngjǐng hěn měi .Dāngdì rén yě hěn yǒuhǎo .Tóng tāmen tánhuà hěn yǒuyìsi .

Zhōngguó cài shì shìjiè wénmíng de, yīnwéi zhōngguórén yánjiū chī de yìshù yǐjīng yǒu hěn cháng de lìshǐ le.

2. Does anyone have friends who learn Chinese but who do not learn Chinese characters ? How far do you think they've got in their progress with Chinese?

Thanks,

[atitarev]

I'm still very curious by the assumption that there are non-beginning learners of Chinese who would not learn Chinese characters but rely solely on pinyin.

1. Can anyone therefore please let me know that you understand perfectly the following 2 sentences in pinyin but you don't learn and don't know Chinese characters in general?

Wǒ hěn xǐhuan Guìlín .Nàli fēngjǐng hěn měi .Dāngdì rén yě hěn yǒuhǎo .Tóng tāmen tánhuà hěn yǒuyìsi .

Zhōngguó cài shì shìjiè wénmíng de' date=' yīnwéi zhōngguórén yánjiū chī de yìshù yǐjīng yǒu hěn cháng de lìshǐ le.[/i']

2. Does anyone have friends who learn Chinese but who do not learn Chinese characters ? How far do you think they've got in their progress with Chinese?

Thanks,

I was able to understand because I use pinyin a lot but I am always trying to combine both. It all depends on your ability to pick up characters. Because I want to progress faster with my spoken Chinese as well, learn more words, be able to understand spoken Chinese and be able to express myself, I use text where you have both pinyin and characters. When I know the pronunciation of characters I use (with the exact tones) I prefer to read and listen to the audio recording following with my eyes character texts only but I find myself peeking back into pinyin text every now and again if I forget something.

Characters need a lot of practice and if you don't write them a few times or don't use them for sometime you may forget them, so using pinyin text might be required for foreign learner for a longer time. The NEW Practical Chinese Reader is a slow going course, which uses combination of characters/pinyin in the first 2 volumes, if you want to test yourself you can hide the line with pinyin but if you have difficulty remembering new characters you can lookup the pronunciation. All new characters are introduced with stroke orders, a workbook where you can trace the characters and a bit of explanation about components and radicals. If you want a thorough learning,it's a good textbook, there are also pure reading and character recognition exercises for each unit.

Theoretically, you can learn Chinese without characters - just to be able to speak and understand but you won't be able to read and write in characters and pinyin texts won't get too far but if you want to build your vocabulary and grammar quicker, learn the basic sentence structure you may use pinyin for a short period. It's prefereable to at least familiarise yourself with characters even at initial stage - read both pinyin and characters, you may be able to remember how the characters look.

To explain my point, estimate how long it will take you to learn the characters in your units. Say, each unit has 15-30 new characters, if you are able to cope with the amount and do the rest - learn grammar, listen to audio tapes, making sure you learn each word, do the exercises, then it's worth doing it properly and learn everything properly with characters - you should be well organised.

EDIT:

These are your sentences, by the way, let me know if there are any mistakes:

我很喜欢桂林。那里风景很美。当地人也很友好。同他们谈话很有意思。

中国菜是世界文明的, 因为中国人研究吃的艺术已经有很长的历史了。

[devi9]

Although I could understand your sentences in pinyin, it took me much longer than it did to read atitarev's character sentences. I think for students who want to learn to read characters, pinyin can be a fiendish thing, as it is in my case. I know I hate looking up words in the dictionary and that's a great incentive for learning the character. If the pinyin is readily available to me, the incentive is lost and I don't learn as well as I would if I were forced to look it up in a dictionary.

[HashiriKata]

atitarev and devi9,

Thanks for your replies. You both are great ( just like me! ) because we took the same, sensible road to learning Chinese by learning also Chinese characters. What I'm trying to find out here is if there are learners who have gone without learning Chinese characters at all and yet still understand the 2 stentences quoted.

Cheers,

[skylee]

中国菜是世界文明的, 因为中国人研究吃的艺术已经有很长的历史了。

It is 聞名, not 文明.

[atitarev]

It is 聞名, not 文明.

Thanks, Skylee, it means I didn't quite understand some portions of the text.

(TC: 聞名 = SC: 闻名)

[atitarev]

atitarev and devi9' date='

Thanks for your replies. You both are great ( just like me! ) because we took the same, sensible road to learning Chinese by learning also Chinese characters. What I'm trying to find out here is if there are learners who have gone without learning Chinese characters at all and yet still understand the 2 stentences quoted.

Cheers,[/quote']

They will be some but not necessarily on this forum. I know there are some foreigners in China (married with Chinese and living in China) that learn spoken Chinese because they have too and some of them don't even know pinyin, let alone characters. When they transiterate their speech, it gets really funny and you can't communicate with them becasue they are not following any rules, still they understand spoken Chinese and can get their message across when they speak, of course it's limited, they can't speak or write. I don't think you can go far enough with pinyin, simply because, there's not so much material in pinyin and if you take the trouble of learning Chinese with pinyin only, sooner or later you start learning characters, if you're serous about your studies. With Japanese it's a bit more relaxed because many comics (manga) are written just in hiragana and some Japanese learners learn quite a lot with just using hiragana, well the characters are written but you can read the pronunciation as well (furigana). In fact, I was spoiled by these materials when learning Japanese.

The pinyin/character books available are far from perfect, usually they don't segment the words properly, putting spaces after each syllable and not capitalizing names, making even harder to read. So, you still need to to know characters to read those books.

E.g. "Tāmen zhù zài Zhōngguó." is easier to understand than "tā men zhù zài zhōng guó." It is good when you have the character text as well. I know a lot people are against such methods on these forum because you are distracted from learning characters but these kind of books would be helpful to build you vocabulary faster. I understand this point but I just find it harder to learn characters at 38 but I am progressing with the spoken Chinese much faster.