The Romanized "pinyin" system exists only to aid you in Standard Mandarin pronunciation, not reading.

I see loads of people on this sub talking about pinyin, and none of them seem to understand the concept of what pinyin really is. Pinyin exists to aid you in standard Mandarin pronunciation - nothing else. If you are using pinyin to read, then you are doing yourself a great disservice. It's akin an American who needs to read "one hundred twenty-three" in order to understand the characters "123." In that example, such a person isn't even near capable of reading proficiently (at least in numbers). Hope you get the point.

Also, I'd like to touch upon "tones." Tones are an inherent part of the word - that's it. If you don't know the tones, you don't know the word. It's akin to a third-grader mis-spelling "language" as "layngwij." Speaking without tones is just as abominable as mis-spelling "language" in such a way. It is literally impossible to communicate effectively without tones (unless all you say is shit like 你好吗).

Hope you have a better grasp of the concepts of the Romanized pinyin system and tones. I included some additional notes below as supplements!

Note #1: I say "Romanized pinyin system" instead of "pinyin" because 拼音 is a verb phrase, and it's not even a noun. Here's the dictionary definition of 拼音：把两个或两个以上的音素拼合成为一个复合的音。如i和 ē 相拼成 iē（耶）,d和 iē 相拼成 diē（爹）。As you can see, using the phrase "pinyin" as a noun in English misconstrues the concept of what it actually is; and, when native English speakers use "pinyin" as a noun in English, they often assume that pinyin necessarily utilizes letters from a Latin-based alphabet, which, strictly speaking, isn't necessarily the case.

Note #2: The Romanized pinyin system ONLY applies to standard Mandarin, NOT Chinese in general. There are many, many different ways to speak Chinese: 北京话、长沙话、四川话、闽南语、沪语、东北话、粤语、etc., and pinyin only applies to standard Mandarin. Someone on this sub asked earlier for help in converting the 四川话 and/or non-standard Mandarin lyrics in Higher Brothers' "Made in China" into pinyin, but, as you can see, pinyin is not meant for this.

submitted by /u/fdasdfsjaa
[link] [comments]

from r/ChineseLanguage: a community for people who are studying, teaching, or interested in Chinese! https://ift.tt/2qm0Quq

--------
More tips about learning Chinese
http://hellolearnchinese.com