
Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died - jrwan
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38621697
======
thewayfarer
I have long thought that Pinyin is underestimated for its simplicity,
conciseness, and its implicit description of regional phonetics in China. Its
uses all 26 letters of English except for "v", but "v" on a keyboard is used
to type "ü" instead, and so Pinyin input does not need a special keyboard
layout. A basic QWERTY layout is all that's needed. This is an improvement
over the Wade-Giles system which requires diacritics and curious apostrophes
that the international community--which generally had no interest in learning
Chinese or the peculiarities of the Wades-Giles system--learned to ignore when
writing Chinese words with the Wade-Giles system (i.e. Taipei should be
T'aipei. In Pinyin it's Taibei. Tai chi chuan should be T'ai chi ch'uan. In
Pinyin it is Taiji quan).

When I was beginning to learn Mandarin while studying abroad in Chongqing, I
was very frustrated with understanding the southern accent. Instead of
pronouncing "zh", "ch", "sh" (retroflex consonants), the locals would
pronounce "z", "c", "s" (dental/alveolar sibilant consonants). As you can see,
Pinyin makes this pronunciation disparity easier to understand for learners
and to anticipate the way that many southerners will (mis)pronounce Mandarin.
Learning all of varieties of pronunciation in China is still a daunting task
with or without Pinyin, but at least it describes this major one pretty well.

~~~
justicezyx
Pinyin actually also slightly changed how Chinese words are pronounced. There
was once a exploratory idea of abandoning Chines written language as a whole,
and adopt fully the latin-character-based language. The compromise is pinyin,
a latin-based pronunciation system and simplified written language.

This absolutely modernize the nation. It's no small feat to educate 1BB+
people in a few decades. The nation's unity is once again at an unprecedented
level.

This is not without its cost. Modern Chinese pronunciation is considered less
appealing to ears, meaning that many sound disappears in the new system. The
resultant language often sounds more dull compared to historical system.

The written language is less artful. The traditional written language is no
doubt a more appropriate subject for Chinese Calligraphy.

I guess the global momentum to move to a more latin-based language is not
going to be stopped. But it's nevertheless a saddening event to see a nation's
historical root is altered significantly in a short period of time. This did
not destroy the root, it's still there. But the changes are more artificial
and more brutal.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
I didn't know the pronunciation was simplified with the creation of pinyin.
That is really interesting. Could you give an example (e.g. two words or
sounds that used to be different and are now pronounced the same)?

~~~
rawnlq
If you look at cantonese, an older chinese dialect, you will find 9 tones:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones)

Particularly useful in that section is this graph:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#/media/Fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#/media/File:Cantonese_tones.svg)

And I think that's a great way to visualize it. Each word has it's own tone
contour and it just so happens that a lot of them could be clustered and
curve-fitted to match a small number of tones. But the number of curves you
choose is arbitrary just like how choosing the number of clusters in k-means
is not well defined.

So if you treat the pinyin as authoritative you will sound robotic compared to
a native speaker who learns each word's actual tone curve naturally. Just like
how if you believe english is a phonetic language you will pronounce lots of
things wrong. (e.g., as an English learner once I learned how to spell "doubt"
I kept trying to enunciate the "b" since I thought the pronunciation I learned
from hearing, "dout", was wrong)

Disclaimer: I'm a native cantonese speaker so my knowledge about tones is
bullshit. Just hypothesizing why text-to-speech and people learning to speak
it always sound funny.

~~~
DonaldFisk
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology)
explains the reason for the disagreement about the number of tones in
Cantonese. If you still think there are nine tones, you should be able to
provide some minimal pairs
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair))
to prove it.

~~~
rawnlq
I am a native speaker so I don't really care about the number of tones, I was
just citing the link. You can speak to me in monotone and I will figure it out
from context just like how you can learn to understand someone with a strong
accent.

My theory above is that a fixed number of tones is a linguist madeup concept
from data that happens to fit the clustering of the tone graphs. The real tone
is a distribution on a per word basis that you learn from natural variations
from the other speakers around you. Do the 6 or 9 or 4 tones sometimes fit
these distributions? Yes, but it's still just an approximation of the real
variations that natives use and shouldn't be treated as an authoritative
pronunciation.

------
crazygringo
As someone who spent time learning Chinese in Beijing, this article is very
confusing to me.

I learned Chinese, like pretty much every other foreigner, via pinyin
pronunciation -- and it's great for language courses. And it's also great for
road signs that foreigners can actually read.

But I _never_ heard of pinyin being used by/for the Chinese themselves
(except, now, as one computer typing system among many, although it still
outputs in characters). All my Chinese teachers explained that young
schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses
special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin.

And increases in literacy in China are simply due to widespread schooling and
massive efforts at memorization of characters by children -- pinyin has
absolutely zero value for functional literacy, because everything is still
written in characters. (There are no pinyin newspapers or books I ever saw.)

EDIT: I see from comments below that pinyin _is_ used with schoolchildren in
mainland China, thanks. But I still don't see how this has helped literacy,
when all reading material is still in characters.

~~~
theseadroid
As someone from mainland China and learned pinyin in grade 1 of primary
school, which happened in early 90s, in Beijing, I use pinyin daily, for
inputting Chinese into electronic devices.

>All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic
pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin
letters), not pinyin.

No, we use latin letters in mainland China, Taiwan uses special characters.

The article is very accurate. Older generations like my parents have to learn
latin lettered pinyin by themselves to use PCs and smartphones.

And the pinyin form of my name and home address are on my passport.

~~~
nrjdhsbsid
Can you explain the reasoning behind typing in pinyin to see the output in
traditional characters? To a native English speaker this sounds silly and
pointless.

Is it something that's mostly tradition or is there advantage to typing this
way?

~~~
jhedwards
If you are asking why don't they type pinyin and leave it like that, then the
reason is that Chinese, particularly mandarin, has a large number of
homophones. Learning elementary mandarin sometimes felt like learning new
meanings for the sounds "ma" "bu" and "shi" for two years. Despite having
nearly the same pronunciation, all those syllables are distinct morphemes with
unique characters to represent them, so characters are a clearer form of
writing. If you are asking why they don't directly enter characters then the
answer is that some people do, but it's not as convenient. To enter characters
you draw it in a box with either a touch screen or a mouse and it's quite a
bit slower, especially compared to the quality of autocomplete in pinyin entry
systems.

~~~
nrjdhsbsid
Well explained. Does the similar pronunciation and many homophones cause any
issues when spoken?

~~~
jhedwards
Sometimes but not very often. The reason is that the rest of the words in the
sentence together with the general situation is enough to make words
unambiguous. This can be a challenge when learning because you have to map
meanings onto both sounds and situations if that makes sense. It also means
that Mandarin is great for making puns.

~~~
nrjdhsbsid
Does being situational make the language more efficient to speak? You don't
need nearly as many words when the meaning is tied to context.

I've always been curious about east Asian languages and culture since they're
relatively isolated from Western influence and historic ties to the British
empire

~~~
bammyz
This might be the case for illiterate people, but these days it's mandatory
for Mainland Chinese citizens to complete at least 9 years of education.
Different words with the same written form usually have different
pronunciations, and different words with the same pronunciation usually have
different written forms. It's rare for a word to carry different meanings
solely depending on context.

------
wodenokoto
> "We spent three years developing Pinyin. People made fun of > us, joking
> that it had taken us a long time to deal with just > 26 letters"

I actually think it is quite fast. Grasping an entire languages phonology is a
huge accomplishment and condensing it to its bare minimum is also impressive.

With that said, I must admit I don't know how pinyin relates to other phonetic
systems such as the Bopomofo[0] or Wade-Giles[1] and for all I know it might
just be the exact same system with different letters.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles)

~~~
imjustsaying
>I actually think it is quite fast. Grasping an entire languages phonology is
a huge accomplishment and condensing it to its bare minimum is also
impressive.

Absolutely. But I don't see how this statement could apply to pinyin. The work
done on German's last spelling reform was impressive in this regard, but
faulty pinyin was not.

~~~
wodenokoto
Care to expand on the faults of pinyin, and how they are more erroneous than
say the German spelling reform?

My experience with pinyin is that it is very robust, and I don't remember ever
encountering pinyin that was ambiguous about how it is read (unlike written
English or romanized Japanese). I have also never heard of standard Chinese
syllables that are lacking a clear mapping onto pinyin.

To me that is very impressive.

~~~
em_te
Compare "xi an" with "xian". One is 2 words and one is 1 word. But for some
reason Chinese people don't like to put spaces in between words so "xi an shi"
is often written as "xi'anshi" which is different from "xianshi".

~~~
lacampbell
Mandarin speakers are seem to be fairly sloppy with their own phonetic
alphabets - you're supposed to have spaces in bopomofo and apostrophes in
pinyin to handle cases like these, but they often don't bother.

It becomes clearer with tones I guess, "Xi1 An1" vs "Xian1". But again, proper
pinyin with tones seems to be a foreigner thing... I don't recall seeing tone
marks or numbers on street signs.

------
aaron-lebo
Very cool.

I noticed an interesting quote in the article:

 _Before Pinyin was developed, 85% of Chinese people could not read, now
almost all can._

While the literacy rate used to be 15% and is now 95%, that means that there
are still 54 million illiterate people in the country. Obviously nothing wrong
with the quote and it is at least in spirit correct, but it's interesting how
vague language can be.

Edit: while looking for those numbers, came across this which is a bit dated
now (2001), but gives more insight into the situation there:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/chinas-long-but-
uneve...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/chinas-long-but-uneven-march-
to-literacy.html)

 _According to Wang Dai, an official with the ministry 's Illiteracy
Elimination Office, literacy rates stand uniformly near the 95 percent level
in the nation's major cities, and throughout its more prosperous coastal
region.

In China's less developed western region, however, there remains much to be
done. The problem is especially acute in areas populated by non-Chinese ethnic
minorities, such as Tibet, where illiteracy rates today run as high as 42
percent.

Nationwide, there are still 30 million Chinese between the ages of 15 and 50
who cannot read at all. Adding in all those defined as "semi-literate" and
those, like Hua Lijun, who are above 50, the total approaches 150 million.
About 70 percent of all illiterate Chinese are women. The largest gains
against illiteracy were made in the 1950s and 1960s when the government made
good on its promises to provide at least basic education throughout much of
the country._

~~~
imjustsaying
Communist China is really good at massaging statistics to make things look
better than they actually are.

Significant numbers of people in modern China can barely communicate to each
other about complex ideas in Mandarin (several hundred million are 2nd
language speakers or quasi 1st-language speakers).

Someone reading faulty pinyin and making a barely-comprehensible sounds might
count as literacy in fluffy government surveys commissioned to show progress,
but in reality being able to read pinyin does not mean someone can read in the
way you or I understand it.

If you need to understand the meaning of something written in Chinese, you
must see the Chinese character. Just because you can read the pinyin
pronunciation doesn't mean you understand what's being said. Being able to
produce sounds is not literacy - there's high amounts of ambiguity.

For example, reading

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí
shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí
shì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shí shì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí
shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì.

Does not tell you the actual the meaning of

石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。 氏時時適市視獅。 十時，適十獅適市。 是時，適施氏適市。 氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。 氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。 石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。 食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。 試釋是事。

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)

Another story entirely is the idea of adding "Simplified" Chinese characters.
Now people who want to be seriously literate have to learn an additional set
of characters. But I digress.

For another example of massaging statistics to show progress, notice how when
a comparison of "China's educational progress!" is made to the West, a place
like Shanghai - whose school district is among the best if not the best in the
entire country - is often then compared to the national average of other
countries as if one were somehow representative of the other.

~~~
nneonneo
As a neat curiosity, ambiguity sometimes cuts both ways - reading

云朝朝朝朝朝朝朝朝散 潮长长长长长长长长消

does not help you unless you also know the intended pronunciation:

yūn， zhāo cháo， zhāo zhāo cháo，zhāo cháo zhāo sàn；cháo，cháng zhǎng， cháng
cháng zhǎng， cháng zhǎng cháng xiāo

([https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%9F%E5%BF%83%E5%AF%BA](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%9F%E5%BF%83%E5%AF%BA))

I agree with the overall point - Pinyin will never be a replacement for
written Chinese. Indeed, both Japanese and Korean struggle with this to some
extent - in Japanese, a sentence written in pure hiragana with no kanji is
very difficult to understand, and in Korean, many people learn hanja as they
are sometimes needed in writing to disambiguate.

~~~
emodendroket
Actually, except for the very old most Koreans know pretty much no hanja
beyond really basic ones like 大. I always think this argument is ridiculous.
Japanese, Korean, and Chinese people have managed to speak their respective
languages (or ancestors of them) for thousands of years without being
excessively troubled by those pesky homophones despite the fact that until the
20th Century only a small minority of them were literate.

~~~
FabHK
Very much this. Some more thoughts:

* Standard Mandarin has a surprisingly small number of distinct syllables, namely about 400 when tones are ignored, and 1300 with tones. English has about 7000 to 15000. So, homophones are a bit more of a problem in Mandarin than in English.

* English disambiguates some homophones in writing (where/were, there/their/they're, and so on), though as less literate people increasingly demonstrate, one can communicate reasonably well without these disambiguations.

* Spanish has an extremely close correspondence between what is written and what is said, and only disambiguates a very few words (typically question words) with an accent, and the writing system works just fine.

* Given that spoken Mandarin works, and disambiguation of homophones in alphabetic languages is only sometimes done, I am personally convinced that some sort of alphabetic writing for Mandarin is absolutely feasible. That might be Pinyin or Bopomofo or some variation thereof.

* Personally, I find the Chinese script very beautiful, but a colossal waste of time (think of the billion of poor kids that had to learn it).

* Would switching to some sort of alphabetic system cut people off of their cultural heritage? Maybe somewhat, but I'd argue it's mitigated by two things: a) Classical Chinese is in fact so remote from modern one that you have to study it anyways in depth, if you are into it. You could still do that, if you are into it. b) Nearly nobody speaks Latin anymore in the West, the horror. Are we cut off of our cultural heritage? Well, somewhat, but there are translations, and if you're really into it, you can still go and learn it, see a).

Great resources on these issues, btw:

* "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", John DeFrancis

* "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma", Wm. C. Hannas, extract available here [http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html](http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html)

* Pinyin Info, [http://www.pinyin.info/](http://www.pinyin.info/)

* Language Log, [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) , in particular Victor Mair's posts

~~~
emodendroket
Yeah I'm a fan of all the resources you mentioned. It's hard to talk about
this without people accusing you of just being too lazy to learn, never mind
that I've already put in the time to learn the Japanese writing system.

------
grabcocque
He saw his eleventy-first birthday? That's a rather curious number and a very
respectable age for a human.

~~~
paulpauper
only about 1500 suerentinarians are thought to have been documented in
history, most of whom were women. being male is really rare..maybe only a
hundred total out off 50 billion people who have ever lived...

~~~
chinhodado
Interestingly your comment is the only google result for "suerentinarians"

~~~
footpath
Maybe it's a misspelling of supercentenarians?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian)

------
achou
To understand the impact of Pinyin, all you have to do is take a look at the
alternative input sources for Chinese on your computer or phone.

On my Mac it's under Settings -> Keyboard -> Input Sources. Add a new input
source for Select Chinese (Simplified) and take a look at the alternatives:

\- Stroke, which uses only symbol characters and numbers to "write" words.
Good luck with that!

\- Trackpad handwriting. You "write" the characters on your trackpad and it
recognizes them. Works pretty well if you already know how to write the
characters. But it's much, much slower in my opinion. Plus, you need to
memorize how to write thousands of characters and how the characters connect
to how the words sound, which there is no systematic mapping for.

\- Wubi Xing, which I'm unfamiliar with but seems radical based. Just look at
the keyboard -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method)

\- Pinyin, which uses your regular English keyboard. With a little training,
you can sound out Chinese words and immediately type them with autocorrect-
like functionality that works amazingly well. I can type Chinese almost as
fast as English this way.

In short, Pinyin has made it possible for Chinese people to operate
efficiently in the modern world we live in.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
A funny thing about how the Chinese type on their phones is that not only they
use Pinyin, but they use the old-school numeric input method (2="abc",
3="def", etc., like SMS in the pre-smartphone era) to type it. Or at least
that's what I saw most people do when I went to Beijing, maybe in other
regions/demographics it's different.

I find it rather amusing that while in the West we use 30 keys to type our
around 30 characters, in China they use 10 keys to type their thousands of
characters.

Also, it's probably not a bad idea for those of us with a tendency to fat-
finger (like myself). I was quite faster writing messages on pre-smartphone
keyboards than on smartphone ones (although probably a large part of that is
physical key feedback vs. virtual keys). I'd definitely give a 10-key option a
try on my smartphone, but it isn't offered.

~~~
astronautjones
This is the main input for japanese as well, I love it and wish an english
version was offered

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Cellphone number pad input is very well-suited to Japanese: each key is a row
of kana. When I type Japanese on my phone, I always use the number pad input
these days.

------
FabHK
Pertinent resources:

* Pinyin Info, [http://www.pinyin.info/](http://www.pinyin.info/)

* Language Log, [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) , in particular Victor Mair's posts

* "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", John DeFrancis

* "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma", Wm. C. Hannas, extract available here [http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html](http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html)

------
noufalibrahim
There was a short interview with him in Stephen Fry's "Planet word" series of
documentaries. His humility was very inspiring.

------
imjustsaying
pinyin is not nearly as good as zhuyin in regards to phonetic representation.

as one example, some words like pinyin's /zhun/ look like they should have one
syllable, but there's actually two, as far as i can tell. or at the least, the
schwa is definitely missing from the pinyin representation, as in, it's not
/zhu@n/, where @ is the schwa.

pinyin is rife with oversights like this, that a learner has no idea about,
and indeed instructional guides don't even mention much of the time.

if you're serious about learning chinese, don't use pinyin unless you want to
spend extra time undoing the damage done by doing so.

~~~
natch
This is complete and utter nonsense. First of all, plenty of native speakers
of, say, Cantonese and other regional languages of Chinese, learn Mandarin
using pinyin, and they do just fine.

Second, as a non-native speaker, the advantages of not having to stumble over
zhuyin and its problems hugely outweigh any advantage it might be wrongly
thought to have. And the benefits continue well past the learning stage.

The /zhun/ example isn't even true. That sound is sometimes broken down for
students as multiple sounds, not syllables, for pedagogical purposes when the
teachers are trying to get through to a student. That's the case with either
pinyin or zhuyin. They explain it as multiple component sounds (not syllables)
because the underlying whacky Chinese phonetic theory says it is made up of
multiple sounds. (By the way this theory takes about 10 seconds to learn, so
the fact that sounds can be broken down into smaller parts is not some mind-
boggling obstacle.) If you were taught that it has two syllables, you may want
to consider the possibility that your teacher is fuzzy on the meaning of the
English word "syllable."

If teachers are using zhuyin, they also break the sounds down to justify or
explain how zhuyin works, since zhuyin is so oddly counterintuitive it needs
extra explanation to help ease the cognitive burden of using it (which could
be the reason it was reformed and mostly dumped decades ago in mainland China
to be replaced by pinyin).

Zhuyin does survive in Taiwan, where they keep it around for political
reasons. Accepting a superior mainland system would be a linguistic defeat,
and would damage their pride, so they cling to an archaic system. They don't
want to admit this outright, so they come up with all sorts of reasons to keep
it, and they end up not learning pinyin well themselves, so with that handicap
they then try to convince naive foreign students that zhuyin is good.

Don't fall for it if you like, let's see... touch typing, reading signs that
are written in pinyin, being able to write down the sounds of Characters you
haven't learned yet and have them readable by the average Chinese person, and
focusing your time and efforts in the right places.

A better argument on your side of the issue would be to say that pinyin is bad
because the 'z' and 'h' and 'u' and 'n' are four separate symbols, but zhun is
one syllable, so it's (you could say) confusing to the mind (it's not). But
that's simply ridiculous. Users of phonetic languages, as all of us are, are
perfectly accustomed to seeing multiple sounds and syllables for that matter
represented by a number of symbols that does not necessarily correspond to the
number of letters.

Mostly the great thing about pinyin is it just does its job transparently
without being a distraction. It becomes invisible almost, because since the
letters are familiar and the sounds are already readable right off the bat, I
can focus on the language and learning words and sounds correctly, instead of
having an extra layer in between me and the language.

Pinyin has served me well as a learner, and the results are hard to argue
with. I didn't start learning until my 20s, and now pass as a native speaker
over the phone. So... don't listen to that guy. Pinyin is great.

~~~
xiaoma
I have learned pinyin and zhuyin both, but found zhuyin to be the "superior"
system. In pinyin the two vowel sounds ㄜ and ㄝ are written as "e", and both
ㄨ(sometimes) and ㄩ are written as "u". Furthermore, typing is faster in
zhuyin—the longest syllable takes 3 keystrokes instead of 5. And on top of
that, learning zhuyin helped my phonics since it forced me away from using
English sounds as a starting point. Another small benefit was that when
reading children's books with zhuyin, I generally only looked at it when
needed, whereas with pinyin, my eyes would be drawn to the familiar roman
characters even when I didn't need them to read a character.

Despite my experience, I still believe claims that either pinyin or zhuyin is
"superior" are pretty subjective. Taiwan has undeniably done better than the
mainland in terms of literacy and computer literacy... but it's also had the
benefit of a superior educational system and more open, wealthier society. At
least for natives, either system is fine. Most foreigners could probably gain
something from learning both (and IPA too, for that matter).

~~~
vorg
> typing is faster in zhuyin—the longest syllable takes 3 keystrokes instead
> of 5 [as in pinyin]

The longest syllable in pinyin is 6 keystrokes: zhuang, chuang, etc

Two bad shuangpin isn't used more extensively to type Chinese as it maps
easily to pinyin but only requires 2 keystrokes per character. The unused
initial keystrokes map to the two-character initial pinyin sounds (i=ch, u=sh,
v=zh), but the mapping from keystroke to medial/final sound is more
complicated. If there was a way to change from pinyin input to shuangpin (or
similar method) input incrementally so it was easier to learn, I think more
people would convert.

------
enjalot
i made a visual explanation/exploration tool about pinyin:
[http://enjalot.github.io/pinyin/](http://enjalot.github.io/pinyin/)

Pinyin really helped me learn Chinese. RIP

~~~
ww520
Very cool!

------
queryly
Pingyin doesn't not only help me learn Chinese, but also learn English's
pronunciation later in life. It's not one-to-one match but close enough.

Bopomofo predates Pingyin and did what Pingyin did but with non-Latin
alphabet. It was always a surprise looking back that Mao adopted "Western"
alphabets for Pingyin when he was very much against western ideology.

It was an excellent call, especially when writing is done digitally nowadays.

~~~
mmport80
Actually - the legend goes - that Mao wanted to ditch Chinese characters in
favour of Pinyin, until Stalin said every great civilisation needs its own
writing system.

Chinese writing was seen as a factor in holding back the country - everything
was up for change or removal.

------
creaghpatr
I learned Chinese using Pinyin it's the first thing you learn and it was a
total epiphany. RIP.

------
mcguire
For anyone interested in the topic, a couple good books are:

* _Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction_ by Chaofen Sun, and

* _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_ by John DeFrancis.

------
mtw
Interestingly, Chinese from mainland china don't know much about him. And I
even doubt it will be in any headline in main press. In China, politics (esp.
agreeing with the Communist party) is more important than achievements. I hope
though that in a few decades, China will find a way to recognize him

~~~
paradite
From the state media:

[http://news.cctv.com/2017/01/14/ARTInHPZIsUdE9qsNSoyKQZu1701...](http://news.cctv.com/2017/01/14/ARTInHPZIsUdE9qsNSoyKQZu170114.shtml)

[http://tv.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2017/0114/c61600-29023458.ht...](http://tv.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2017/0114/c61600-29023458.html)

From the two largest news website:

[http://news.163.com/17/0114/22/CAPAC2CT00018AOQ.html](http://news.163.com/17/0114/22/CAPAC2CT00018AOQ.html)

[http://news.sohu.com/20170114/n478709845.shtml?fi?_t=t](http://news.sohu.com/20170114/n478709845.shtml?fi?_t=t)

More coverage from baidu:

[http://news.baidu.com/ns?cl=2&rn=20&tn=news&word=%E6%8B%BC%E...](http://news.baidu.com/ns?cl=2&rn=20&tn=news&word=%E6%8B%BC%E9%9F%B3)

------
Chia
R.I.P.

~~~
WouterZ
I was taught pinyin at Chinese university - too bad the Chinese textbooks
didn't include the genesis of pinyin - interesting, R.I.P.

~~~
jason_slack
I am taking Mandarin classes and our textbook has both pinyin and characters
for almost everything. There is always a section in each chapter that is
entirely in characters.

I have been buying books on Amazon to help accelerate my reading. I need a
story to follow along with. These book indeed do not have any pinyin.

Pinyin is fascinating to think about. Sometimes words are created from pinyin
when you say them. Example: New York is Niǔyuē (纽约). Another is how in English
we say "ha, ha". In pinyin it has been adopted exactly that way: Hāhā (哈哈).

------
forgingahead
Interesting facts about pinyin and Simplified Mandarin -- Mao and his cadres
were interested in spreading the gospel of Communism, but with high illiteracy
rates, people were generally not as susceptible to propaganda.

Both initiatives, pinyin and Simplification, were designed to more easily
bring literacy rates up, for the purpose of spreading Communist teachings.

So you invent an essentially new language, make it accessible via Roman
letters to even non-Chinese people, and all documentation and literature
produced in that new language talks about the glory of the CCP. Pretty
brilliant (if sinister).

~~~
hgfdhjtyd
Silly revisionism. You think Mao engaged in a national literacy program for
the sole purpose of inculcate people with Communist propaganda? I don't think
so. That's equivalent to saying Hitler built railroads solely so people could
get to Nazi party gatherings and transport Jews to camps.

It's possible for Mao to simultaneously be a disastrous autocrat who committed
atrocities and to have engaged in projects of national and economic
development. Some of them were debacles. Others, like pinyin for Romanization
and simplification of writing, were complete successes.

Do you know anything about Chinese? What "new language" are you talking about?
Simplified characters and pinyin are not new languages.

The persistence of traditional characters in Hong Kong/Taiwan or diaspora
doesn't say anything about the success of simplified characters, which brought
literacy to over a billion in the Chinese mainland.

I have some personal experience in this matter; I do not have a natural
aptitude for foreign language learning. I learned oral Mandarin as a second
language as as a child. I was taught reading and writing Chinese with
traditional characters and with Zhuyin/bopomofo (still used in Taiwan, at
least until recently), not Romanization.

I studied Chinese in college, learning introductory written Chinese again with
simplified characters and pinyin. My personal experience as a native English
speaker was that pinyin and simplified characters were substantially easier to
get to a functional level of literacy level.

It's not really rocket science, just from a human memory perspective,
simplified characters have many fewer strokes and radicals, and many
homonymous characters are united so there are fewer of them. This also makes
keyboard entry somewhat faster and makes smaller characters legible on
displays (or even in print).

I'm not arguing that simplified characters necessarily reduce the effort in
achieving a very _high_ level of literacy, but for _basic_ literacy,
simplified writing/spelling systems are effective.

~~~
FabHK
Agreed that Pinyin is a great help for the learner.

However, have to disagree on the character simplification.

While it would sure make sense to make characters simpler, simplification
really only made some characters faster to write (by hand), by reducing the
number of strokes. It is very unclear whether it makes things easier to read
(in print), or easier to write/remember (when you use a keyboard to type it).

