Is It Necessary to Learn Pinyin when Learning Chinese

Chinese is a non-phonetic language; the pronunciation of a Chinese character is not linked to its written form. Pinyin (拼音：pīnyīn) is the official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet.

So, is it necessary to learn pinyin when learning Chinese? The answer is yes. Here are the reasons.

• It is a great tool to help you pronounce Chinese properly. Pinyin shows you the standard pronunciation of Chinese characters. It is the most reliable way of knowing the correct pronunciation; even native Chinese speakers may sometimes forget or mis-pronounce Chinese words.

• Pinyin enables you to figure out the pronunciation of a new Chinese word quickly. When you encounter a new word and you don’t have anyone around to teach you how to pronounce it, just read the correspondent pinyin, and you will know how to pronounce it.

• You can use pinyin as an input to type Chinese on a computer. Pinyin input is the most popular way, majority Chinese use it.

Caveat:

Because pinyin is similar to English, many native English speakers find it very comfortable just to read pinyin, and ignore the correspondent Chinese characters that pinyin is marked for.

At first, this may seem to be a good thing, because you can start to pronounce Chinese words very quickly. However, your eyes are usually looking at the pinyin instead of the Chinese characters, you don’t get visual exposure to the Chinese characters; therefore, you will not remember and recognize the Chinese characters. In the long run, being overly dependent on pinyin will hinder your Chinese character learning. Chinese characters, instead of pinyin, are the building blocks of Chinese literacy. It is far more practical and fast to read the actual Chinese words than pinyin.

So, use pinyin wisely. It is great to use pinyin when you learn new words. Once you read pinyin and know how to pronounce the words, move your eyes to the correspondent Chinese characters. Read the new words several times without looking at the pinyin, this will eventually wean you from pinyin.

I will write another post about tips of memorizing Chinese characters.

Now, please try to learn a couple of new words using pinyin:

dà niú

大牛           (big cow, big ox)

hǎo rén

好人                     (good person)

míng tiān

明天           (tomorrow)