6 ms·

Chinese schools teach using phonics - specifically, using a phonetic transcription system based on the Latin script called pinyin. Thanks to the exact correspon

Chinese schools teach using phonics - specifically, using a phonetic transcription system based on the Latin script called pinyin. Thanks to the exact correspondence between spelling and Standard Chinese pronunciation, this system can be rapidly mastered. Once students have a working command of pinyin, they are taught to associate traditional Chinese characters (hanzi) with the pinyin words that they already recognise. The introduction of pinyin revolutionised Chinese language teaching and had a near-miraculous effect on literacy rates; As a second-language user of Mandarin Chinese, I am indescribably grateful for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780508668693 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780508668693

krackers 6y ago
That's interesting, because people always say that furigana is a "crutch" when learning Japanese vocabulary, but it would seem the be the natural correspondence of what you mentioned (namely first learning spoken japanese with furigana and then later associating the words you know with the kanji). Maybe the larger number of homophones (with lack of tones to distinguish between them) makes this less effective?
- musicale 6y ago
  Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it. Also I expect the onyomi/Chinese readings of many kanji might fall into phonetic groups as they do in the hanzi. (Note also that kanji and hanzi are basically the same word with some phonetic shifts.) Apparently onyomi actually means "sound reading."
  - livueta 6y ago
    Yeah, 音読み - literally sound-reading. There definitely is a phonetic element to it. Since most/many complex words (jukugo) you'll encounter are formed from the same ~2k kanji, you often end up quite literally sounding it out. As a simple-ish example, 音読み itself: 音 is read 'on', 'in' or 'son' in descending order of frequency. 読's usual onyomi is 'doku', but the み ('mi') at the end clues you in that this is a on-kun jukugo, where the second kanji uses the kunyomi reading because... nevermind. Anyway, kunyomi is... 'yomi', so, onyomi. It's plenty complicated in practice with all kinds of stuff messing you up (multiple onyomi, nonstandard readings of all kinds, rendaku, etc.) but fundamentally you're operating phonetically, at least when you first encounter the written form of a word you probably have heard before. On furigana: it's useful but also absolutely can be a crutch. Although you're generally going to want to acquire jukugo vocab from various sources and not just sound everything out after learning common kanji, that process of phonetically processing a compound word is a great workout for your fundamental kanji knowledge. On top of that, for whatever reason, I find it makes me feel like I've comprehended the text when I actually haven't, like the kid in the article with the dog story, though in this case it's lack of understanding through phonetic over, rather than under, emphasis. At least personally, it's easy to rip through the furigana reading and have my brain be like "yep, just turned all of those symbols into sounds, job done." That's probably part of why many resources, like https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/, allow you to quickly toggle them. Open a story and hit the 漢字の読み方を消す button.
  - soraminazuki 6y ago
    > Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it. So true, especially when you encounter a proper noun that includes kanjis. It's almost impossible to guess how to read them, even for native speakers, because the usual rules surrounding how to read kanjis are largely ignored when it comes to proper nouns.
tgb 6y ago
I'm learning Chinese and I think you've avoided the question. The crux of the matter is how to learn the thousands of character-to-pinyin/meanings mappings. It doesn't fit at all into the phonics description given in this article because you can't sound out a character. And the way I'm learning is straight memorization which this article makes sounds bad, but what's the alternative in Chinese? And this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.
- gizmo686 6y ago
  I think the idea is to use Pinyin to bootstrap knowledge of hanzi. A) This would allow you to use written language to teach hanzi and B) This would allow you to have children read text that includes words they don't know how to read, by providing those words in pinyin. I'm not sure how it actually works in Chinese, but as a adult second language learner of Japanese, having a phonetic system I can use to transcribe the logoriphic system is quite helpful.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    > B) This would allow you to have children read text that includes words they don't know how to read, by providing those words in pinyin. Indeed. Here's a page from a textbook for second-graders: https://i.imgur.com/g1UlUZP.jpg https://i.imgur.com/g1UlUZP.jpg It's a story teaching the meaning of the proverb 揠苗助长 (pulling sprouts to help them grow). Some of the characters are annotated with their pinyin above, e.g. 揠 yà or 筋疲 jīn pí. This text in particular is a bit weird in that it only uses 揠 yà in the title and replaces it with 拔 bá in the story, so the reader would have to infer that 揠 yà and 拔 bá are synonyms. I think 拔苗助长 is actually the more common way to write the proverb.
- solinent 6y ago
  I think if you can learn one per hour every day you'll be doing pretty well. If you're in school you can easily learn a few every week. It's also not rote memorization, rote memorization is mapping text->text not text->meaning.
knolax 6y ago
Pinyin is only phonetically regular if you don't actually speak Chinese, and therefore learn all your pronounciations from Pinyin. Even for speakers of Mandarin in Beijing it lacks a competent ability to indicate a merged 兒 at the end of a character. In fact many people forget Pinyin by the time they enter highschool. Whatever success attributed to Pinyin has less to do with Pinyin and more to do with the social changes that coincided with it's introduction. Bopomofo, a more phonetically regular and easier to use system was used for decades before Pinyin and is still used in Taiwan today. In addition, there are many adults alive today in their 60s and over who never learned any phonetic system and can read and write just fine. People in Hong Kong also don't seem to learn any romanizatiom system for Cantonese pronounciations in school and can obviously read and write just fine.
- oefrha 6y ago
  > In fact many people forget Pinyin by the time they enter highschool. Since most Chinese people type Chinese using Pinyin-based input methods (not counting voice recognition and handwriting recognition as typing here, which are also pretty widely used these days), this claim is absolutely, undoubtedly, 100% false. Edit: Somehow read “many” as “most”. Since “many” can mean anything from one thousand people out of 1.4 billion to all of them, it’s not possible to refute the claim. But the idea should be clear: forgetting Pinyin upon entering high school is not common.
  - knolax 6y ago
    You forget that a good number of professionals do not use phonetic input methods, and use component based ones like CangJie, Boshiamy, WuBi, Four Corners etc. Plus even phonetic input methods have "fuzzy modes". If you ever watch an experienced typer use a phonetic method you'll see that often they only enter the first letter of each character. The fact that any number of people forget Pinyin at all demonstrates that it can't be compared to English phonics. You can't forget phonics, you can forget Pinyin.
    - oefrha 6y ago
      Sure, you can forget Pinyin, that doesn’t mean people do forget Pinyin, which you have provided no evidence for and doesn’t match observed reality. No convenience features in Pinyin-based input methods will help you if you actually forget the whole system. In fact, I personally know elderly people who were educated in 1930s and 40s who later learned Pinyin because it’s easier to type that way. And yes, I’m aware of the non-phonetic input methods, and that professional typists could type faster in them. But the learning curve is way steeper (compared to basically none).
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
> The introduction of pinyin revolutionised Chinese language teaching and had a near-miraculous effect on literacy rates; This is inaccurate. Taiwan continued using Zhuyin, the native syllabary China used prior to the 60s, and Taiwan's literacy rates have never lagged. Pinyin and Zhuyin have a one-to-one mapping at the syllable level, but Zhuyin is more accurate at the single character scale. E.g., the sounds for both ㄜ and ㄝ are written as an e in Pinyin and ㄨ and ㄩ are both always written as u. Worse still, the ㄩ sound is also sometimes represented as ü in Pinyin (when preceded by an l). Pinyin requires more context (and rules) to distinguish which vowel sound is being represented. Zhuyin isn't perfect either. It's definitely a better representation of single consonant or vowel sounds but it still has its own warts around diphthongs and triphthongs. Pinyin is definitely a flawed phonetic system, but it's usable and widespread. That's it's real strength, along with being less alien to non-Chinese speakers.
- SuperNinKenDo 6y ago
  I think Pinyin has had a bigger impact than Zhuyin simply by its use in China and in the broader Huaren communities. That said, Zhuyin is also a recent innovation, and so the point about having some kind of phonemic/phonic/phonetic system of spelling as your basis for literacy probably still stands, at least with whatever strength it has, I think the other poster might be overstating it to some degree, although it's definitely a godsend to have in Chinese now, whether it be Hanyu Pinyin, Zhuyin, or whatever.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- fiblye 6y ago
  Zhuyin is also relatively new, at around 100 years old. Historically, the closest thing Chinese had to phonics was fanqie, which was a comparatively obtuse way of representing sounds with other hanzi.[1] Basically, any hint of a true phonetic system probably helped literacy rates during the 1900s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie
- tgb 6y ago
starfallg 6y ago
Hong Kong has been teaching Cantonese Chinese without using a romanisation system to do so and its literacy rate never lagged. Pinyin may help second language learners greatly, but was never the cause of the literacy spike. It's the rollout of the education system to villages that caused it. If they taught Chinese characters without Pinyin, they would most likely have decreased literacy rates to a similar extent also.
- SuperNinKenDo 6y ago
  I agree that counter evidence to the claim, but one thing to keep in mind is that Cantonese is a local language, which many speak at home and with close friends and family from birth (or at least some closely related dialect), while Mandarin is often not. So if you concede that something like Pinyin might help L2 learners, it's reasonable to think it might be less necessary, but still helpful in an L1 setting, which Mandarin sits somewhere between, and Cantonese is well in to L1. It will be interesting to see if something like Jyutping takes off in the native Cantonese speaking community at some point or not. It's also a different case because spoken and written Cantonese are such different languages, although I don't want to overstate what effect, if any, that might have.
cwkoss 6y ago
Maybe we should be teaching kids to read the phonetic alphabet before we teach them the english alphabet.

krackers 6y ago

That's interesting, because people always say that furigana is a "crutch" when learning Japanese vocabulary, but it would seem the be the natural correspondence of what you mentioned (namely first learning spoken japanese with furigana and then later associating the words you know with the kanji). Maybe the larger number of homophones (with lack of tones to distinguish between them) makes this less effective?

musicale 6y ago
Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it. Also I expect the onyomi/Chinese readings of many kanji might fall into phonetic groups as they do in the hanzi. (Note also that kanji and hanzi are basically the same word with some phonetic shifts.) Apparently onyomi actually means "sound reading."
- livueta 6y ago
  Yeah, 音読み - literally sound-reading. There definitely is a phonetic element to it. Since most/many complex words (jukugo) you'll encounter are formed from the same ~2k kanji, you often end up quite literally sounding it out. As a simple-ish example, 音読み itself: 音 is read 'on', 'in' or 'son' in descending order of frequency. 読's usual onyomi is 'doku', but the み ('mi') at the end clues you in that this is a on-kun jukugo, where the second kanji uses the kunyomi reading because... nevermind. Anyway, kunyomi is... 'yomi', so, onyomi. It's plenty complicated in practice with all kinds of stuff messing you up (multiple onyomi, nonstandard readings of all kinds, rendaku, etc.) but fundamentally you're operating phonetically, at least when you first encounter the written form of a word you probably have heard before. On furigana: it's useful but also absolutely can be a crutch. Although you're generally going to want to acquire jukugo vocab from various sources and not just sound everything out after learning common kanji, that process of phonetically processing a compound word is a great workout for your fundamental kanji knowledge. On top of that, for whatever reason, I find it makes me feel like I've comprehended the text when I actually haven't, like the kid in the article with the dog story, though in this case it's lack of understanding through phonetic over, rather than under, emphasis. At least personally, it's easy to rip through the furigana reading and have my brain be like "yep, just turned all of those symbols into sounds, job done." That's probably part of why many resources, like https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/, allow you to quickly toggle them. Open a story and hit the 漢字の読み方を消す button.
- soraminazuki 6y ago
  > Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it. So true, especially when you encounter a proper noun that includes kanjis. It's almost impossible to guess how to read them, even for native speakers, because the usual rules surrounding how to read kanjis are largely ignored when it comes to proper nouns.

tgb 6y ago

I'm learning Chinese and I think you've avoided the question. The crux of the matter is how to learn the thousands of character-to-pinyin/meanings mappings. It doesn't fit at all into the phonics description given in this article because you can't sound out a character. And the way I'm learning is straight memorization which this article makes sounds bad, but what's the alternative in Chinese? And this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.

gizmo686 6y ago
I think the idea is to use Pinyin to bootstrap knowledge of hanzi. A) This would allow you to use written language to teach hanzi and B) This would allow you to have children read text that includes words they don't know how to read, by providing those words in pinyin. I'm not sure how it actually works in Chinese, but as a adult second language learner of Japanese, having a phonetic system I can use to transcribe the logoriphic system is quite helpful.
- yorwba 6y ago
  > B) This would allow you to have children read text that includes words they don't know how to read, by providing those words in pinyin. Indeed. Here's a page from a textbook for second-graders: https://i.imgur.com/g1UlUZP.jpg https://i.imgur.com/g1UlUZP.jpg It's a story teaching the meaning of the proverb 揠苗助长 (pulling sprouts to help them grow). Some of the characters are annotated with their pinyin above, e.g. 揠 yà or 筋疲 jīn pí. This text in particular is a bit weird in that it only uses 揠 yà in the title and replaces it with 拔 bá in the story, so the reader would have to infer that 揠 yà and 拔 bá are synonyms. I think 拔苗助长 is actually the more common way to write the proverb.
solinent 6y ago
I think if you can learn one per hour every day you'll be doing pretty well. If you're in school you can easily learn a few every week. It's also not rote memorization, rote memorization is mapping text->text not text->meaning.

knolax 6y ago

Pinyin is only phonetically regular if you don't actually speak Chinese, and therefore learn all your pronounciations from Pinyin. Even for speakers of Mandarin in Beijing it lacks a competent ability to indicate a merged 兒 at the end of a character. In fact many people forget Pinyin by the time they enter highschool. Whatever success attributed to Pinyin has less to do with Pinyin and more to do with the social changes that coincided with it's introduction. Bopomofo, a more phonetically regular and easier to use system was used for decades before Pinyin and is still used in Taiwan today. In addition, there are many adults alive today in their 60s and over who never learned any phonetic system and can read and write just fine. People in Hong Kong also don't seem to learn any romanizatiom system for Cantonese pronounciations in school and can obviously read and write just fine.

oefrha 6y ago
> In fact many people forget Pinyin by the time they enter highschool. Since most Chinese people type Chinese using Pinyin-based input methods (not counting voice recognition and handwriting recognition as typing here, which are also pretty widely used these days), this claim is absolutely, undoubtedly, 100% false. Edit: Somehow read “many” as “most”. Since “many” can mean anything from one thousand people out of 1.4 billion to all of them, it’s not possible to refute the claim. But the idea should be clear: forgetting Pinyin upon entering high school is not common.
- knolax 6y ago
  You forget that a good number of professionals do not use phonetic input methods, and use component based ones like CangJie, Boshiamy, WuBi, Four Corners etc. Plus even phonetic input methods have "fuzzy modes". If you ever watch an experienced typer use a phonetic method you'll see that often they only enter the first letter of each character. The fact that any number of people forget Pinyin at all demonstrates that it can't be compared to English phonics. You can't forget phonics, you can forget Pinyin.
  - oefrha 6y ago
    Sure, you can forget Pinyin, that doesn’t mean people do forget Pinyin, which you have provided no evidence for and doesn’t match observed reality. No convenience features in Pinyin-based input methods will help you if you actually forget the whole system. In fact, I personally know elderly people who were educated in 1930s and 40s who later learned Pinyin because it’s easier to type that way. And yes, I’m aware of the non-phonetic input methods, and that professional typists could type faster in them. But the learning curve is way steeper (compared to basically none).

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

> The introduction of pinyin revolutionised Chinese language teaching and had a near-miraculous effect on literacy rates; This is inaccurate. Taiwan continued using Zhuyin, the native syllabary China used prior to the 60s, and Taiwan's literacy rates have never lagged. Pinyin and Zhuyin have a one-to-one mapping at the syllable level, but Zhuyin is more accurate at the single character scale. E.g., the sounds for both ㄜ and ㄝ are written as an e in Pinyin and ㄨ and ㄩ are both always written as u. Worse still, the ㄩ sound is also sometimes represented as ü in Pinyin (when preceded by an l). Pinyin requires more context (and rules) to distinguish which vowel sound is being represented. Zhuyin isn't perfect either. It's definitely a better representation of single consonant or vowel sounds but it still has its own warts around diphthongs and triphthongs. Pinyin is definitely a flawed phonetic system, but it's usable and widespread. That's it's real strength, along with being less alien to non-Chinese speakers.

SuperNinKenDo 6y ago
I think Pinyin has had a bigger impact than Zhuyin simply by its use in China and in the broader Huaren communities. That said, Zhuyin is also a recent innovation, and so the point about having some kind of phonemic/phonic/phonetic system of spelling as your basis for literacy probably still stands, at least with whatever strength it has, I think the other poster might be overstating it to some degree, although it's definitely a godsend to have in Chinese now, whether it be Hanyu Pinyin, Zhuyin, or whatever.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fiblye 6y ago
Zhuyin is also relatively new, at around 100 years old. Historically, the closest thing Chinese had to phonics was fanqie, which was a comparatively obtuse way of representing sounds with other hanzi.[1] Basically, any hint of a true phonetic system probably helped literacy rates during the 1900s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie
tgb 6y ago

starfallg 6y ago

Hong Kong has been teaching Cantonese Chinese without using a romanisation system to do so and its literacy rate never lagged. Pinyin may help second language learners greatly, but was never the cause of the literacy spike. It's the rollout of the education system to villages that caused it. If they taught Chinese characters without Pinyin, they would most likely have decreased literacy rates to a similar extent also.

SuperNinKenDo 6y ago
I agree that counter evidence to the claim, but one thing to keep in mind is that Cantonese is a local language, which many speak at home and with close friends and family from birth (or at least some closely related dialect), while Mandarin is often not. So if you concede that something like Pinyin might help L2 learners, it's reasonable to think it might be less necessary, but still helpful in an L1 setting, which Mandarin sits somewhere between, and Cantonese is well in to L1. It will be interesting to see if something like Jyutping takes off in the native Cantonese speaking community at some point or not. It's also a different case because spoken and written Cantonese are such different languages, although I don't want to overstate what effect, if any, that might have.

cwkoss 6y ago

Maybe we should be teaching kids to read the phonetic alphabet before we teach them the english alphabet.