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  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 

  At the onset I want to say that I want to learn to speak Mandarin the way it is intended to be spoken. I want to learn to speak it with the correct tones. Recently, I joined a number of groups on Face Book that are for sharing experiences learning Chinese. In most of the groups the beginners as well as intermediate learners complain about tones being the most difficult to learn in Mandarin. Just like many other matters people just say what others have said. Anyway, are tones as important as they are made to be? 

  There are about 408 pinyin syllables, and most of them can have any one of the four tones (some of them don't exist in certain tones, and some of them can also be pronounced as a “neutral tone”). Pinyin officially covers all possible sounds in Mandarin. There are no single characters with more than one syllable. There were such characters at one time but were all abolished in Mainland China. Checking Google, I found one such character which is no more in use today. 瓩 qiān​wǎ​ kilowatt (old) / single-character equivalent of 千瓦 Why then would anyone teach Mandarin using Phonics. Refer my post here . This is the first such YouTube post and if left unchecked more so-called teachers will promote this way of teaching kids Pinyin and create problems instead of providing solutions.

  I attended the Wellness conference at SICC from the 7 th to the 9 th June and have been away from social media. I learned many valuable facts from the convention including breathing exercises. Meanwhile, I have been following an excellent YouTube channel to learn to speak Mandarin fluently. Each of the lessons has a portion for shadowing. 

  “Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.” — Charlie Munger There are two main places we can learn from: our own experience or the experience of others. This blog is about my experience learning Mandarin. I hope it will encourage my readers to learn it as well. I have heard a number of teachers from China who say that they cannot teach foreigners to learn to speak in Chinese without them learning Chinese characters. This is false information. Foreigners not only can learn to speak but they will be able to read anything written in Pinyin. Along the way they will learn the Chinese characters. 

  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 ...