To post or not to post in pinyin....

[Mike]

I have my first piece of written homework from my Mandarin evening class. I have written about ten sentences in pinyin! Like: -

Q: ni3 he1 cha2 he2 ka1 fei1 ma?

A: bu4 he1. wo3 zhi3 you3 cha2 ke3 kou3 ke3 le4

(A: 你喝茶和咖啡吗) / B: 不喝.我只有茶可口可乐)

I've no idea if this and the other sentences I have written are correct. My question is about the right way to proceed. I imagine that if you know the correct answer and you can guide me in the correct sentence construction, the last thing you want to do is untangle pinyin. Am I correct? So, looking for corrections to my work, can I post in pinyin or will there be a collective sigh, and generally no response? I’ll understand either way 

Mike

[Quest]

我只有茶可口可乐。

我只喝可口可乐？

You can post in pinyin, but you are right, people (or I) prefer characters.

[Mike]

Blimey Quest, this is a tricky as I thought How about:

Q: ni3 he1 cha2 he2 ka1 fei1 ma?

A: bu4 he1. wo3 zhi3 he1 ke3 kou3 ke3 le4

(A: 你喝茶和咖啡吗) / B: 不喝.我只喝可口可乐)

只有 and 只 both seem to mean 'only'?

[necroflux]

只 is translated as "only", where 只有 more specifically means "only have" or "only exists".

[Desmond]

maybe instead of 不喝 you could say 都不喝, which may give a little more emphasis on the fact that you don't drink either one...

Yeah, I prefer characters! Nice thing here is that if I don't understand a character, I'll copy and paste it into an online dictionary. Pinyin is kinda bland, only good for phonetic description, not to read normally

[roddy]

My own preferences are for simplified characters, traditional characters, and then pinyin. You'll get a better response with characters, as it's what the vast majority of people on here are used to working with. You're welcome to post pinyin only stuff, but I reckon it might affect the number of responses you get.

Roddy

[Ferno]

*sigh* this is what happens when the writing and speech of a language evolve seperately. The speech gets sidelined.

[Mike]

Having made my first post in Chinese things immediately got x^n times more difficult (where n=some really big number!). But I think I must agree with Ferno - as if my view counts for anything - that you have to study all aspects of a language simultaneously. There will be some exceptions, like living amongst native speakers and having no time or inclination to use the Internet or to write - even then it strikes me that knowing signs like 出口 and 入口 might be useful, and mixing up 男 and 女 could be a problem!

Anyway, today I bought 250 Essential Chinese Characters by Phillip Yungkin Lee. Progress is going to be slow, probably very slow, but balanced

[Desmond]

The more you learn characters, the easier it becomes! It was SO HARD in the beginning to memorize even fairly simple characters.

Now just a few weeks ago, I spent one weekend learning all the traditional varients of the charactes I learned in my first year of Chinese. Only one weekend and it was so quick and painless. So that just showed me that things do get a lot easier!

加油！

(jia1 you2) means "add oil!" or "go for it!"