How to write Mandarin in Western script

When you first start learning Mandarin, you need a way to make notes and memorize. Since the Chinese language has thousands of characters, you would end up in a sort of chicken-and-egg situation. Luckily there is Hanyu Pinyin (Mandarin written in phonetics) which employs the same roman characters as are used for English and other European languages.

Even though the Hanyu Pinyin letters make sense to you as long as you’re proficient in English, the pronunciation of each letter is not necessarily the same as in English. If you have experience learning any other European language, you will realize that each language pronounces the letters of the alphabet differently, and Chinese written in Western script is no exception. Wikipedia offers a good guide to the pronounciation of each character.

Getting the pronunciation of each letter right is essential to build a good basis for speaking, reading and writing Mandarin accurately. Each syllable in Hanyu Pinyin represents a character. For example:

hǎo –> 好 (good)

I have found that many Singaporeans, though native speakers of Mandarin, often don’t speak Mandarin exactly according to the standard; there is some ‘local flavor’ to it. For example, Singaporeans (and Malaysians, for that matter) have difficulty distinguishing between the ‘z’ and ‘zh’ sound.

If you start learning Mandarin with no prior knowledge, you’ll want your teacher to drill you on pronouncing each letter as it’s supposed to pronounced. It’s annoying, but in my view the best teachers are the ones that endlessly correct their students as they make subtle mistakes in the pronunciation of the letters. If you don’t get this right in the beginning, it’s going to follow you all along.

The great advantage of Hanyu Pinyin is that it reflects the correct Mandarin pronunciation exactly, which cannot be said about written English and most other European languages, where the same combination of letters can often have a different pronunciation depending on the word. For example, the latters ‘age‘ get a different pronunciation in ‘engaged’ and ‘garage‘. There’s no such thing in Hanyu Pinyin.

You may have noted the accents on the characters, almost above each syllable. These indicate the tone. In Chinese, a word can have a totally different meaning, depending on the pitch in which it is pronounced.

The 1st tone is pronounced in high pitch and does not change over time. It is represented by a macron (horizontal line) on top of the vowel in the syllable that is to be pronounced in first tone. Examples: mā (mother), shān (mountain).

The 2nd tone is a rising tone, from medium high to high pitch. It’s the one that causes me most trouble. In Hanyu Pinyin it is represented by an accent aigu (diagonal line from bottom left to top right) on top of the vowel in the syllable that is to be pronounced in second tone. Examples: má (hemp), shí (ten).

The 3rd tone is a tricky one. It first falls, then turns around and ends in higher pitch. When you first learn to speak Mandarin, you’ll teacher let you exaggerate the pronunciation; in everyday usage it’s really quite subtle and it takes time before you are going to recognize its distinction with the second tone. In Hanyu Pinyin, third tone is represented by a caron (which looks like a small ‘v’). Examples: mǎ (horse), jiǔ (nine).

The 4th tone is generally not considered as difficult. It drops all the way from high to low, kind of like what you would do in English to close off a sentence or make a statement sound definite. This tone is symbolized by an accent aigu (dropping diagonal line). Examples: mà (scold), zuò (to do).

Wikipedia offers sound recordings that you may want to listen to to get more of an idea.

If your aim is to only speak Mandarin, you could do this on the basis of knowing how to read and pronounce Hanyu Pinyin. But although Chinese use Hanyu Pinyin to search for characters when typing or sending an SMS, they are generally not able to decipher a text that is all in Hanyu Pinyin. This is because one letter combination can stand for very different characters.

Take for example the letters ‘shi’. They can stand for the following (and this list is not exhaustive!): 是 (to be), 十(ten), 时(part of 小时(hour), 时候 (moment), 时间 (time)，市 (city center). All in all, my Mandarin input program gives me 209 characters to choose from when I enter the combination s-h-i.

If you also want to read and write, Hanyu Pinyin is almost always used as the first step to learning to read and write the ‘real’ characters. Most learning texts would have the characters and Hanyu Pinyin in superscript on top of the characters for pronunciation and memorization purposes. At a later stage, vocabulary lists will have three colums: the word in characters, the Hanyu Pinyin transcription for pronunciation, and the meaning of the word.

It was first introduced for this purpose of making it easier to learn Chinese script. This blog post covers some of the history of Hanyu Pinyin.