Misinformation/ disinformation on Pinyin by misinformed people

 

The following are extracts from a Facebook thread. This is a good example of people who read what they want to read and ignore what is important.

Lion Luqman Michel

With tone marks, Pinyin is as easy if not easier than Hanzi. You can read anything written in Pinyin that is within your vocabulary.

NOTE: Here is my post on the importance of tone marks. LINK 

Kristin Schütz

Lion Luqman Michel not as I see it. There are many characters with the same pinyin, including the tones. Once you get the basics, you distinguish the (same) pinyin by reading the characters and suddenly it becomes easier to read the characters directly. You can understand a text even though you don't know all the words just by reading the signs. I now use pinyin only to get the right pronunciation.

Lion Luqman Michel

Kristin Schütz Unfortunately, you have been misinformed. I self-studied Pinyin to HSK 4 level and now learning HSK 5 level. Firstly, do you know that there are only 408 syllables in Mandarin? English has more than 10,000 syllables.

NOTE: She did not answer the above question. If one wants to learn one should question anything one is unsure of. Here is my post on the 408 syllables in Mandarin. LINK

Kristin Schütz

Lion Luqman Michel if you are HSK 4, you have to know the characters. Upon HSK3, it's a must.

If you learned the pinyin up to HSK4, that's easy in appearance, you feel you know the words, but unfortunately that's not real. You can't read a text in pinyin, as one pinyin has too many meanings (starting with shí). It's like the students who consider tones are not that important. They definitely are. And how would you read a newspaper? It's not written in Pinyin.

Pinyin is helpful for pronunciation, and I will certainly always depend on it, but ever since HSK 3, to go further, one needs the characters - and it's, at least for me, way easier with the characters, as you can often understand the meaning, when one of the characters is composed of another you do know or is combined with something you understand.

NOTE: Where did this girl come up with the notion that one cannot read text in Pinyin? Here is a whole book written in Pinyin with no Hanzi. LINK

Unfamiliar words may be checked by copy-pasting the word onto an online dictionary. 

Kristin has used the example of Shi which is the poem using only the Shi character with different tones. Kristin has fallen for the Chinese teachers on social media who insist that one needs to learn Characters to learn Mandarin. My stand is that one can learn to speak by learning Pinyin. Why would I want to learn Hanzi to learn to read Chinese newspapers? I don’t even have time to read books and papers in English and Malay.

Lion Luqman Michel

Kristin Schütz You are misinformed. Who told you that HSK 3 Characters are a must after HSK 3?

NOTE: It is a must if you want to do the HSK exams but not if you want to learn to speak. Kristin may choose to remain naive but should not mislead others.

The following are comments by other readers.

Jonhan Labyu

I thought Chinese characters were too hard to read but I realized pinyin is more difficult.

Kong Jeanie

Jonhan Labyu pin yin is much more difficult to read than Chinese characters because pin yin can represent different characters. If you have a Chinese dictionary, you will know what I mean.

One one person Christine Tsau clicked 'like' on my comment.