Non-Chinese learning Mandarin - Part 1

 

 

“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 second world war.)

I believe the Chinese began to see the fluency of the Americans speaking Mandarin after having learned Mandarin using the Yale translation and copied the Romanisation with slight alterations to call it their own.

(The first edition of Hanyu Pinyin was approved and adopted at the Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress on February 11, 1958. It was then introduced to primary schools as a way to teach Standard Chinese pronunciation and used to improve the literacy rate among adults.)

Why would the Chinese introduce Romanisation after hundreds of years of using Chinese characters? It is to standardize the pronunciation. The Mandarin spoken by today’s youth is pronounced much better than the older generation. The tones are properly enunciated and many of the words are now pronounced correctly.

I have written several Facebook posts on why Pinyin is a must to learn to read in Mandarin.

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 words 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.

 

Note: I have started this blog to share with non-Chinese the difficulties faced by us learning to speak in Mandarin.

Who would know this better than a non- Chinese, me, who learned to speak using romanised words? However, I believe my level is only up to HSK level 4. I am determined to learn and improve my vocabulary and be able to speak at HSK 5 level by the end of this year. I will start intensive learning from July this year.

We shall examine if non-Chinese can learn to speak Chinese well without having to learn Chinese characters.