Ah, Pinyin. You deceptive little minx, you.
Let’s face it, you misled me. I’m probably not the first, either, am I? No, no. I’m sure you’ve lured many sailor on the sea of linguistic progress with your siren call of phonetic spelling. But, oh! How those hopes were dashed!
Little did I know when I set out on my course that I’d be learning not one new written language, not two new written languages (I’m counting Traditional and Simplified as separate creatures here), but three written languages! Because you’ve got your own special rules, don’t you, Pinyin? Yeah, I’m onto you. The Roman letters help, I’m not going to lie to you there. But my poor overcrowded brain now has to translate this language backwards and forwards before I’ve seen it from all angles.
It’s me.
是我
Shì wǒ.
Shr waw.
That last line? That’s closer to the actual sound that I hear. That’s the spelling I try to approximate when I’m speaking. It’s not precise. I realize that. But these little tricks help me get where I’m going. And I’ve got a lot of them! Like these:
的
de
duh水果
shuǐ guǒ
shway gwaw
I’d like to open the floor now. What about you Poddies? Any of you make this mental note every time you read Pinyin? What are some of your tips and tricks for remembering the way things sound when you’re away from the comforting bosom of the podcasts?
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When I first started learning, I tended to work off of sounds I was good at to make sounds that I wasn’t so good at. For instance, if I knew how to make ‘tu’ reliably, I would think about it and then try to pronounce ‘du,’ ‘lu,’ etc. (just remember that qu, ju, and xu don’t have the same final sound as those!). That kept me going for a while, until finally the sounds had patterned themselves onto my mind.
Ahh pinyin does not lie it just beguiles us with layers of misdirection. A bunch of people here http://www.language.berkeley.edu/ss/main.html strapped pinyin down and tortured it for its innnermost truths.
The above is actually a wonderful resource all the pinyin sounds and tones in both male and female voices plus games as well. It looks a little complex at first but get stuck in. For a while I used it regularly like a gymn (just forgot Chinese for a bit and excercised regularly here drilling sounds, not even thinking about words). After not too much practice it becomes natural.
Like Spanish (which is more phonetic than English) it is only phonetic once you can associate the correct sound to the alphabet (at least it is consitent).
Sadly this doesn’t gaurantee that I will say the sounds correctly
but it does help me hear them and to associate the pinyin wiht the correct sounds in my head 
.
I can now read a line of pinyin out accuratly (in my head). Any telepathic Chinese speaker will confirm my wonderful accent
Now I am struggling with the way the sounds morph when spoken fast or in different sentances (thats where a whole new bunch of little white lies have appeared).
Ahh I wish I could edit. I forgot to mention some people (me being one) remember pinyin with tones much better using the ugly method (with numbers). wo3 is a three letter word to me, wǒ read correctly but never carried the tone information into my head.
This annoys some people but pinyin is just a tool, so if you remember the numbers better then the accented characters that is the way to go (and no keyboard mappings to worry about either).
I agree with Chris on the ease of reading of numbers, and they’re easier to type too. It also makes it much easier to do a text search through my notes whether or not I can remember the word’s tones, and besides, those tissy little marks become invisible to eyes that have sat on a face for more than 40 years.
The time spent nutting out pinyin (but not pronunciation itself) should never be an excessive proportion of study time. After all, it is common to be fluent in Mandarin, to live love play and work in China, without knowing a single dian of pinyin.
Personally, “OU vs. UO vs. O” was the bain of my existance for several months….
Haha, I agree with Frank that my original way of wrapping my brain around pinyin had an inordinate amount of ‘w’s.
Dwa, shwa, gwaw….
I guess I worked so hard at pinyin that it is now second nature to me. I read it as I read English without even thinking about it. I used to wonder about teaching small children who were just learning to read and was afraid it might interfere with their learning to read English. I think the human mind has an amazing ability to sort things out and compartmentalize. You will get it if you just stick with it. There are some good freebie drills on the internet to help you it really is not a big deal and wow, talk about helping look up Chinese characters or creating a document in Chinese! There is no substitute for keyboard entry. My Wenlin program allows me to type in streams of pinyin and then quickly go through and convert to Chinese–have you ever tried composing a Chinese document using a graphical tablet? I have seen folks do it and no way it could be anywhere near as efficient as using pinyin.
John - That “lu” sound drives me nuts! I have resolved to only drink black tea.
Chris - Thanks for the great link! And let’s hope there aren’t too many telepathic folks when I get to China. With so many pretty girls, I may get myself slapped a lot.
AutySue - Ugh. I just hate the way it looks. Isn’t that odd? I usually only look at the slashes if the word is unfamiliar to me. Most of the time, I know the sound of the word from context. I kind of wonder what native speakers do when they come across an unfamiliar character. It’s not like they can sound it out phonetically.
Colleen - Yeah! And don’t forget “dway!” Oh, but that “OU vs. UO vs. O” is still vexing me!
Erica - I also use the Pinyin system to type. I can’t even conceive of doing it any other way!
haha, I’d say a graphical typing means is much more efficient than using pinyin: one pinyin combination has too many correspondent characters!
Just remember, lu != lü, so “green tea” lǜchá and “road” mǎlù aren’t the same ‘lu.’ That screwed me up something serious when I started.
Could you explain the graphical typing method for me? I honestly haven’t a clue how that would be done!
John - Oh, no… fourth tone is the easiest for me. But that funky little “ü” sound will be the death of me. Thank Zod I don’t need that sound to call for help.
A graphical Chinese typing method works like this: the characters are dissected into “components” —sorry, I cannot access to Wiki now and don’t know the official names for these components. Maybe you can do a search yourself.— that are the most commonly used in all the characters. Take my method 五笔 wubi for example, each letter except z, which is reserved as a “master key” letter, is assigned with several 部件, I think maybe combinations are more appropriate. To encode a character, you dissect it according to the rules, take the first three and the last components and type the correspondent letters. In general, four letters for each character, but there are characters that are most frequently used, less frequently used, still less frequently used, and the least frequently used, and many of them require only one, two, or three letters. What’s more, you type out phrases instead of individual characters using this method. Two-character phrases, three-character phrases, four-character phrases, …, all with four letters, as long as you encode them according certain rules. There are many versions of wubi today and as far as I know, they all allow the users to found their own reservior of phrases.
e.g. 我q
在d
你wq
爱ep
健wvf
康yvi
爱惜epna
保持wkrf
传家宝wppg
光辉灿烂iioo
中华人民共和国kwwl
美利坚合众国utjl
匈牙利qatj
I am Zoidberg!