The Pinyin Debate

In 1958, the Chinese used the Roman alphabet to create a system which would more easily convey the pronunciation of Mandarin. This system, known as pinyin, allows words (and tones) to be phonetically sounded out as opposed to striclty memorized. Needless to say, pinyin has become a staple of foreign education in the chinese language, and is also utilized in Chinese primary schools.

In English we are accustomed to phonetically sounding out words- so even if you do not know the definition of a word you can still pronounce it.

Example: Antidisestablimentarianism - The longest word in the English language, I have no idea what the hell it means, but I can say it.

This is not so with Chinese- words in chinese are created by combining different characters, each with different meanings; these characters themselves are composed of different radicals (radicals are smaller characters/stroke patterns that also have meaning ascribed to them) . To an extent this allows you to break down words and understand their meaning and even possibly give you clues to pronunciation. That being said, if you haven't been shown a character/radical, told what it means, told how it sounds, and memorized it there is really no way to work it out. Without a large character/radical vocabulary good effing luck.

Beyond this, character memorization does not translate into being able to recreate it; i.e. just because I can read the character does not mean I can re-write it (this is something I have learned painstakingly over the past few weeks).

Examples:

学生 --- (I dare you to try and sound that out)

Breaking the word down
学 pronounced xué, means- study or learn
生 pronounced sheng, means - to be born, to grow, life

Together this character (combination) produces the word for student and is pronounced xuésheng. However, without being taught either of these simple characters and memorizing their specific sound how would one ever make sense of 学生?? Not to mention, this is a very straightforward example, with easy characters. There are a lot of characters out there with a lot of different combinations. I've said it before, learning Chinese is a daunting task.

With all of this in mind, last night while frantically studying Chinese flash cards, I had what I thought was a stroke of genius. Why don't the Chinese save everyone a little bit of trouble and switch to pinyin?!?! Almost all Chinese people already read and write in pinyin (they have to to be able to send text messages or type on computers) so the switch over wouldn't have a huge learning curve. Furthermore, this would make the language much more accessible to the western world and would make my life infinitely easier. Obviously there is a huge resistance to this idea , as it would mean ditching thousands of years worth of written langauge and culture; however when I took the question to google I stumbled across a pretty interesting debate on the topic.


An interesting question to think about -
"How many more years does it take for an average Chinese student to achieve the same level of Chinese literacy as an average English student for English literacy? If the additional burden is, let's say, three years. Is it a good idea for the Chinese society to spend, every generation, three billion years of man-hour to master its own language--the man-hour that other phonetic-based societies spend learning other things like history, physics, maths, etc?" - Sukitc

If you’re interested in reading some pretty interesting opinions about pinyin vs. characters click here.



Thats all I have for today, I'm heading to Beijing tomorrow evening so check back soon.


****Antidisestablihmentarianism - opposition to the withdrawal of state support or recognition from an established church, esp. the Anglican Church in 19th-century England.****