Learningchinese@blogspot.com

  This is a continuation of part 1. This blog is for foreigners who intend to learn Chinese.  In part 1, I stated the following: Briefly: i.           There are many characters with different tones which can easily be represented by the tone marks on top of romanised letters. ii.          Many characters carry neutral tones when combined with other characters and they carry different meanings. iii.         The same character can represent a completely different tone and mean a completely different thing. iv.         The same character can represent a completely different sound. v.          I believe there may be more reasons but the above should suffice to show why Pinyin (romanisation) is a must to learn good Mandarin.

    “The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.” — Charlie Munger How did Pinyin come about and for what reasons? The Chinese written language has been around for a few thousand years. Why would China then introduce Pinyin in the 1950’s? The following, (in brackets) are what I dug up from the internet. (Wade–Giles is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Francis Wade, during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert A. Giles's Chinese–English Dictionary of 1892. Wade–Giles was based on the Beijing dialect and was the system of transcription familiar in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century.) Yale romanisation (It was devised in 1943 by the Yale sinologist George Kennedy for a course teaching Chinese to American soldiers, and popularized by continued development of that course at Yale. It was taught to the Americans during the ...