Why not to learn Pinyin?

Some friends think that Chinese Pinyin is the foundation of Chinese characters; you can not master Mandarin Chinese without learning Pinyin well. This is a big mistake. Chinese characters are not Pinyin characters but characters combined by form, pronunciation and meanings which are mainly by character form and supplemented by pronunciation.

If students spend lots of time and experience to learn Pinyin at the beginning of learning Chinese but seldom contact characters, they will be accustomed to recognize Chinese characters by means of recognizing Pinyin when they accept the teaching of Pinyin but could hardly accept the form of complicated Chinese characters. So maybe they can’t leave Pinyin. This is a undoubted curved way for learning for foreigners who lacks the Chinese environment.

In the teaching practice, we’ve met so many foreign students who can read clearly and loudly of text with Pinyin noted, but without understand the meanings. If they leave Pinyin, they can’t recognize characters even taught just now. That’s because their sensitivities to character forms are not trained at the beginning, which leads to their unawareness of recognizing characters when they are “moved”.

According to our teaching experience with many years, new comers should learn characters first and then learn Pinyin when they’ve reached certain levels.

Chinese Pinyin is only an assisted tool after all. Students can look into dictionary to learn Chinese with it and typing, writing on computers. But it is not Chinese, and can’t replace Chinese characters. The basic function above all is communication with others. Therefore, when learn Mandarin Chinese especially spoken Chinese at the beginning, you should try best to learn more about Chinese characters themselves.

Chinese is not learnt
This sentence is a challenge to traditional Chinese language teaching. Traditional Chinese teaching method try best to let Chinese learners master every word, Pinyin and grammars. These tasks torture every learner. These friends, with great interest to Chinese culture learning, will lose passion and patience under this kind of learning method and atmosphere. They can not communicate with others though they stick to learn until the end as it is deaf and dumb Chinese.

Actually, as driving a car, language is a communication tool for humans and it is a repeated process to master and learn it. Will it be effective to drive a car well only through talking by method and skills? People with common sense know that driving a car needs practice. Through iterative practice, application, revision and practice again, it will realize the fun of driving with agilities. So, driving is not leant but by practiced. So do the language learning, it is practiced. The language is like a communication tool, which needs to be used iteratively and mastered flexibly, but not to be combined with formulas and tools for communication like math or physics tools. The word is not the element in the formula either that can be combined randomly for results. Have you ever thought how wonderful it is if Chinese can be learnt as native language learning?