Chinese Pinyin is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese. It is the most popular phonetic system for writing Mandarin, and it uses the Latin alphabet. Chinese Mandarin is not an easy language to learn, but pinyin is usually taught in everyone’s Mandarin learning journey. Knowledge of pinyin enhances and accelerates your Mandarin learning. Pinyin is incredibly useful when typing Chinese on your smartphone or computer. Pinyin is the key to unlocking the intriguing and exciting world of Chinese characters and their meaning and their cultural significance. Every Pinyin sound represents many Chinese characters. Therefore, as you advance in Chinese learning, it becomes difficult to remember every combination of pinyin. Therefore, students are always encouraged to learn Chinese characters
Learning pinyin has many advantages and a few disadvantages as well.
Pros:
- Pronunciation – with pinyin, you can easily and quickly pick up Mandarin pronunciation and even look up words in the dictionary and learn new words yourself.
- Conversation – you can quickly start speaking Mandarin with confidence and clarity
- Ease of learning – Pinyin is very easy to learn since it is written in the Latin alphabet
- Mastering character – Pinyin and its tone marks support non-native speakers in pronouncing Mandarin characters
Cons:
- Dependence: You can become dependent on pinyin and not be able to memorize characters
- Tones: Tones in Mandarin words change depending on context and therefore Pinyin is not always helpful
- Sounds: The Pinyin alphabet does not have the same sounds as the Latin alphabet
- Connections: Characters help make connections between different words in Mandarin and is more practical. This is not possible with Pinyin as it is not intuitive.
While Pinyin is an integral part of Chinese language learning, it is not the foundation. Depending on your Mandarin learning goals, you can choose your learning path. If you are looking to gain a grasp of Chinese quickly, and master conversational Mandarin for business or travel, you can start with a course that focuses more on Pinyin and gradually builds up to characters as you go along. However, if you are going to spend considerable time in China either for work or study, then reading and writing Mandarin characters is a must.
At Happy Mandarin, we have courses for working professionals that focus on enabling the students to master conversational skills while we slowly build their Chinese character proficiency. We even create customized courses based on your business or learning needs. For school students, however, we offer in-depth Mandarin language courses that are fun, engaging and highly academic
