What do you start with when you learn a new language? Very often you’d start with the script, but I think by now you must’ve noticed that Chinese “script” consists of thousands of unique characters. So we are better off starting by learning the primary romanisation system for Mandarin, which is Pinyin.
We won’t dive deep into Pinyin background, but a quick summary might be useful to know what you’re dealing with:
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- Pinyin was published by the Chinese government in 1958, in 1980s was adopted by International Organisation of Standardisation. Before that there was no official romanisation system.
- It uses a typical for all of us set of 26 letters used in English + one extra letter “ü”, so the total is 27. That to say, it is important to understand that although Pinyin is based on Latin alphabet it actually has a fairly little resemblance of pronunciation with English or any other European language.
- It was initially designed to replace Chinese characters, but later the idea was abandoned
- Pinyin is not common in Taiwan, Taiwan represents phonetics differently (more on that on Bopomofo page)
Now you might be excited about the ability to use roman letters for Chinese instead of the characters. So can you persist on using Pinyin and completely ignore them? Let’s get this question out of the way:
Can I only learn how to speak Chinese and read Pinyin avoiding going through Chinese characters?????
The answer is absolutely no, you’ll soon find that Chinese with no characters is too confusing. It’s only the onset of your studies is when the characters feel too complex and unnecessary; further down the road they become your good friends guiding you through a ridiculously enormous mass of homophones you’re yet to face.
Now that you are a little more familiar with what Pinyin is, it’s time to learn all its sounds, after that you’ll be able to read Chinese phonetics with an ease. The link to the following article is here.
Good luck!