learning pinyin and characters of mandaring chinese at the same time?

Question

i'm beginning to learn mandarin chinese..so i wonder..do i have to learn pinyin and the characters at the same time?

i'm starting to learn the language to today..so yeah..i'm very new..

or learn pinyin first then characters?

Answer 1

Ni hao ma? Yep, they're right, at the same time. Pinyin is a bridge so you can associate phonemes to characters. Mandarin uses characters and if you're used to letters, your brain naturally associates sounds with letters because that's the way your lexical values are set up.

Zaijian!

Answer 2

You don't have to learn both at the same time. You definitely need Pinyin for the tones. I spontaneously started recognizing Hanzi after my first two years, and this inspired me to start taking it more seriously. Actually, I had no interest in learning Hanzi; I just wanted to speak and understand. I did try to learn Hanzi at first but found it a waste of time. I have since found it quite interesting and I'm getting quite good at it, but I really have no practical use for it.

I have been in China for the past five years and know many foreigners that speak quite fluently and only know a few basic characters. You can do fine without it unless you have a reason for learning it. It takes a long time to learn spoken Mandarin; even longer to learn how to read and write.

It's all about what you consider important. Do you want to learn characters? Do you need to learn characters? You definitely need to learn Pinyin with the tonal markers though, I recommend avoiding the "false" Pinyin (numbers for tonal indicators). Basically, you only need Hanzi if you wish to read. While some find that it helps in learning spoken Mandarin, most foreigners I meet just stick with Pinyin. Just my experience and observation.

Cooltronix, you are absolutely right, I'm just speaking from my experience here in China. Most foreigners get frustrated with Hanzi at first and progress more rapidly with Pinyin alone. As I mentioned, I started learning Hanzi naturally after two years. But I enjoy learning it now, when I began studying Mandarin, Hanzi just took up too much of my time. After studying in China for the past five years, I can honestly say that Pinyin is enough for nine out of ten foreigners. The question was "Do I have to learn Pinyin and characters at the same time?" The answer is no, you don't "have" to. If it helps okay, if it hinders the learner, hold off until natural interest kicks in.

I am now about 70% fluent in spoken Mandarin, and 30% in Hanzi fluency. For me, I think I'm doing rather well. I'm glad I did it the way I did.

Answer 3

I suggest you learn both. You need pinyin for the sound. The characters will help you to read. Just pinyin alone is not that useful.

I like to add: Earthlin... is right you don't HAVE TO learn the characters. But the characters will give you one extra tool to remember a word, otherwise you will forget a lot since sounds in Mandarin sound all the same and the forget rate is very fast.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

If you want to understand Mandarin but you have no clue the place to commence then a course for Mandarin is the ideal on the internet program for the newbies because it actually starts with the basis.

Answer 6

You don't need to worry about learning one before the other. At the same time will be fine.

Answer 7

Hanyu pinyin (漢語拼音), often abbreviated as pinyin (拼音; "spelling sounds" literally), is the most wiy used mandarin romanization system: p. r. china and singapore, and many other countries as well. the library of congress uses pinyin to catalog its collection in chinese, most contemporary dictionaries use pinyin to spell out chinese characters, and the vast majority of chinese textbooks published overseas use pinyin, to name just a few.

Advice on learning approach

Just like "cultural" is pronounced differently in french and english, "can" symbolizes different sounds in mandarin and english -- the sounds represented by a certain letter are not always the same in different languages.

Therefore, when learning pinyin, instead of referring to the english pronunciation of each letter, you should try to establish a direct connection between a certain letter, or sequence of letters (like "sh", "ang", etc.) and the exact mandarin sound represented. in other words, using chinese characters as reminders of sounds represented by pinyin letters will be much more sensible since you already know the mandarin sounds.

www.cooleasyfun.com
http://cooleasyfun.com/wordpress/?p=47

Answer 8

it's good to use www.zhongwen.com

they write about each character and also stroke order (this is in traditional but stroke order ("animation") is in siplified)
they tell whhy those characters look like this and not lke that...