Deceptive Pinyin

Walking around Beijing, one doesn’t see much English. About 90% of the signs are in English. So, I was delighted when I saw that street signs and subway signs have the Roman alphabet under the Chinese characters. I now could identify where I lived and what subway station I needed to get off at.

Well, my delight lasted until the first time I got into a cab. I tried telling the cab driver the name of my street and he had no idea what I was saying. Finally, I gave him my Chinese ID and he was able to read my address. That’s when I had my first inkling that my pronunciation was even worse than I thought.

Later, I was telling my co-worker the story to try and see why the cab driver couldn’t understand me. I told my co-worker that I live on Tiancun Road, near the Yuquanlu subway station. I pronounced the names, phonetically, as tee-ahn-coon and you-kwan-loo.  It turns out that I was wrong: the names are tee-ahn-soon and you-chawn-loo.  My co-worker told me that I wasn’t pronouncing the Pinyin correctly.

After our conversation, I went to look up Pinyin. I’d heard of it but, I didn’t really know what it was. Pinyin is the system of Romanizing Chinese characters. It’s sorta phonetic but, not in the way that an English speaker would assume. There are some sounds in Chinese that aren’t going to be adequately expressed by anything A-Z so, different sounds are assigned to some letters and letter combinations. This is one reason (of many) that my pronunciation was so bad.

Pinyin is used for more than just signs. It is the way that Chinese speakers type using a regular computer. To type in Chinese, you have to have a program installed that recognizes Chinese, like on Microsoft Word. Then, you type what you want in Pinyin and a list of characters appears that have spellings matching what you typed in. Last, you pick the correct character and move on to the next word.

In addition to being used for typing, Pinyin is used to teach children to read Chinese characters. This is because Chinese characters contain no clues about pronunciation. So, first, children learn to read Pinyin. Then, they learn to read Chinese characters using flashcards with Chinese characters and Pinyin underneath.

Overall, Pinyin is pretty useful. I just wish it made more sense to me.

An Example of Pronunciation Differences between Pinyin and English

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Trying to type Beijing in Chinese characters in MS Word.

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Pinyin Pronunciation Guide Source: http://chinaculturecorner.com/2013/09/22/pronouncing-chinese-pinyin/