Demystifying Chinese Mandarin Pinyin - How does it enhance learning?

Hello fellow learners!

When it comes to learning Chinese Mandarin, you will learn Pinyin and Hanzi or Chinese Characters (ideograms) as two parallel systems for reading and writing. However, what is pinyin? Have you thought about what it is equivalent to in your own language? If you were to teach someone your own language, what would you teach them first - sounds or the symbols that represent the sounds? Is it listening and speaking or reading and writing you would teach first?    

In fact, after my child had started primary school in the UK, I realised that pinyin in Chinese is equivalent to the English phonics they learn in primary schools in the UK. Basically pinyin is a way of denoting sounds in Chinese Mandarin with romanised symbols i.e. the Latin alphabet, A-Z. 

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So if pinyin is a way of denoting the speech sounds in Chinese Mandarin, then how do we empower our learning with it? Think of how phonics is taught to young children for reading and writing. Pinyin has a similar effect in Chinese language except it is not an end but a means to an end, because reading and writing involves Hanzi which is the Chinese characters (ideograms). This then begs the question of what is more important for a beginner Mandarin learner - to be able to listen and speak, or to read and write? Your learning goals should be prioritised based on this distinction. 

Learning pinyin can help you organise your memory of the sounds of Mandarin hence significantly speed up your learning of listening and speaking. Similar to phonics, there are a fixed number of sounds (phonemes) in Mandarin. There are approximately 44 sounds in English with some variation depending on accent and articulation, and there are about 47 sounds in Mandarin. In February 1958, the 1st NPC approved the promulgation of the "Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Scheme'', and the first statutory Latin alphabet-style Chinese Pinyin scheme was born in China. This scheme (the latest version) is still used as the guideline for teaching pinyin in primary schools in China today. It specifies for primary school students, they need to learn the most common 23 consonants/initials and 24 vowels/finals. If you systematically learn and memorise all these 47 sounds of Mandarin, you will have little problem communicating with the majority of people who speak standard Mandarin or Putonghua in China.

Now imagine, if you do not start with pinyin, but with the Chinese characters. What would your learning journey look like? An interesting fact may give us some clues. Since 2017, primary school students in China have to learn some Chinese characters first for a few months before starting to learn the romanised pinyin. The purpose was to return to a more traditional way of Chinese education, to allow children to form an initial impression of the ideograms rather than the latin alphabets in their minds. However, the curriculum treats pinyin as merely a tool for character recognition rather than relying on it to read. In contrast, children learning English are taught to read with phonics, where phonics is emphasised as a tool to help children read. That is because English words are directly represented by their phonetic spellings.

Another point we must bear in mind is that in either case, children at primary school age already have a good command of the speech sounds of the language before learning phonics or pinyin. They can already understand common things and be able to speak the language to a certain degree. However, the difference is for Chinese children, being able to read involves reading in characters rather than phonectic representations, pinyin. The main lesson we can draw from this is that Chinese reading and writing does not depend on knowing pinyin. Pinyin is a tool for learning characters if you can already speak the language, otherwise pinyin can help you learn the speech sounds just like in English. However which approach to adopt also depends on the age, if you are under 12 immersed in Chinese Mandarin then learning verbal communication can be easily achieved without pinyin. 

This article is a very simple introduction to Chinese Mandarin Pinyin and how it can help you speed up your learning of Chinese speech sounds or phonetics.