OhmyGawd! Lesson 1: Intro to Pinyin

Welcome to the first lesson of my new casual online course:



We're not about the teacher-student relationship here. I'm helping you learn some Putonghua (Mandarin) because I'm your friend and it'll be fun. We may go months between lessons. You may find yourself wanting to review past lessons. Whatever. Go at whatever speed you want. There's no homework, unless you wanna just write or record some stuff to show me how you're doing.

We're gonna ignore written characters for a while. Nowadays on the mainland, most kids learn Pinyin before they start memorizing thousands of characters. Pinyin is the official way of writing Chinese using English letters. Many people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese diaspora communities in the US and elsewhere still use the older, crappier Wade-Giles system or just make shit up. Pinyin is NOT perfect. It's not even consistent, which some of you (especially Shreyas) will hate. But, like Churchill said of democracy, it's the best we have.

Let's ignore tones for now too. We'll get to those later.

One Sound, One Character

In Chinese, every character is pronounced with a single sound and every sound is a seperate character. This means that if you see the Pinyin for Wo ting zhe zhong yin yue de shi hou zui ai ni, you know that's a 12-character sentence. This means if you see SQUIGGLE SQUIGGLE SQUIGGLE SQUIGGLE, you pronounce it in exactly 4 syllables.

Parsing Jammed Syllables

Not every character is a complete word or idea. Oftentimes, people will try to clump compound words together when writing Pinyin. For example, Putonghua ("Mandarin") is three characters: pu, tong, and hua. Putong is itself a compound that means "standard." Hua is "speech."

How do you learn to parse Pinyin that's been jammed together in clumps of compounds?

Most every sound in Chinese starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel. Some sounds are just a vowel. For instance, "Arabia" is Alabo: a-la-bo. The only exceptions are the dipthongs N and NG and (sometimes) R. So Putonghua is pu-tong-hua. "Serbia" is Nansilafu: nan-si-la-fu. Erguotou, the infamous grain alcohol, is er-guo-tou. So when you get a new consonant that's not N, NG, or (sometimes) R, it's a new character. Yes, Y counts as a consonant.

In places where it would be possible to break the syllables multiple ways, Pinyin requires an apostrophe. The most common example of this occurs in the name of one of the oldest cities in China, Xi'an, which is xi-an, not xian. Of course, if you have a word like xianzai ("now"), it's xian-zai.

Here, practice by breaking these compounds into syllables:

1. Baba shuo wo yinggai dao tamen nali qu da pingpangqiu.
2. Beijingshi de Aoyunhui yundong shi erlinglingba nian kaishi de.
3. Wo ting zhezhong yinyue de shihou zui ai ni.

Consonants

Pinyin was designed to use every letter on the standard QWERTY keyboard, with the sole exception of V. Because Chinese has a number of consonants that English doesn't have, this means that some letters are pronounced differently than they are in English.

b p m f d t n l g k h r s z ch sh j

These are pronounced more or less the same, except the Chinese H and R are more aspirated than in English. And the Z is a bit different, but not noticably so for beginners.

c q x zh

These are the stinkers.

c = TS
q = CH
x = SH
zh = J

Now, the TS you could understand, perhaps, but why duplicate CH, SH, and J? Those already exist! The short answer is that these characters go with different vowel sounds, as we'll shortly see. In the meantime, just go with it. I know it makes no sense.

Vowels

There are an awful lot of vowel sounds. You can look at the full list here, if you're so inclined:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin#Pronunciation_of_finals


Instead of going through all that crap, making you learn all the different sounds a single "O" can represent (information you'll instantly forget), you're going to learn vowel sounds by listening to rock music, though this is going to be a gradual process.

The only rule you have to learn now is that a "Y" followed by an "I" is silent. So yi is pronounced "ee," yin is "een," and ying is "eeng."

Long Kuan - When I Listen to This Kind of Music, I Love You the Most

Wo ting zhei zhong yin yue de shi hou zui ai ni, zui ai ni
Wo ting zhei zhong yin yue de shi hou zui ai ni, zui ai ni
Shang tian shi xian le wo de xin yuan
Wo ting zhei zhong yin yue de shi hou zui ai ni, zui ai ni

Yin yue he ni dou shi wo hu xi de kong qi, de kong qi
You le yin yue you le ni wo cai neng hu xi, neng hu xi
Ji ran shi xian le wo de xin yuan
Wo yao he ni he yin yue yong yuan zai yi qi, zai yi qi

[Edit: here's the rest, plus the characters, for those who have some background already]

Shun jian, zai na li he tian zhi jian
Lu bian, liu xia ling yi ge xin yuan
Yan qian, chuan suo guo wo de hua mian
Tian bian, you ren shuo ta xiang nian

Shei hui lai dai wo ba zhe lu zou bian
Shei hui zai li kai

我听这种音乐的时候最爱你，最爱你
我听这种音乐的时候最爱你，最爱你
上天实现了我的心愿
我听这种音乐的时候最爱你，最爱你

音乐和你都是我呼吸的空气，的空气
有了音乐有了你我才能呼吸，能呼吸
既然实现了我的心愿
我要和你和音乐永远在一起，在一起

瞬间在那里和天之间
路边留下另一个心愿
眼前穿梭过我的画面
天边有人说他想念

谁会来带我把这路走遍
谁会再离开

Listen to the song and try to read along, paying attention to JUST THE CONSONANTS for now. This is the chorus, which is the first thing you hear. You can keep restarting the song over and over again, or just listen through for the 3-4 places that the chorus repeats. Listen to it over and over, until you can read the consonants correctly.

Once those wacky ones, the ZH, X, Q, C, silent Y, etc. stop seeming so odd, NOW you can start to listen for the vowels. Don't jump ahead before you're ready; you'll just discourage yourself and say "Forget this crazy stupid language." That would make me sad.

When you listen to the vowels, start trying to associate the letter combinations with the sounds you're hearing. Some will be familiar, like "-ai" sounding like "I." Others will be weird. Like "-ou" sounding like "O," while "-o" is "AW." Don't try to memorize them or anything. This is just exposure. It will all seem less and less bizarre as you get more comfortable with the madness.

Next time, we'll talk more about vowels, get a new song, and get into the basics of grammer and making sentences. Yay!

REALIZE: You won't possibly have Pinyin down cold from just these first few lessons. That's not what I expect. It'll still seem funky and awkward for quite a while yet, unfortunately. But you have to start gaining some familiarity with it so that, several months from now, it will all start making sense to you.