The Pinyin Project

Welcome to the pinyin project. The idea is to work collaboratively with other students of Chinese to create a gradually evolving and expanding series of photo-journals and videos that give people a chance to be creative as they learn and use Chinese.

If you would like to contribute to this project your photographs and videos can be saved in the comments section. I will post them after they have been reviewed, and I will continue to post images and videos regardless of whether or not anyone else does since this project beautifully combines many of my favorite hobbies: writing, short film production, photography, language study, and, of course, wandering around and having adventures.

Feel free to ask questions too. If you want help translating things from English to Pinyin you can post your questions here and I will translate them. Reasonably high frequency items only please. I may even take photos or make a film related to your question. Also, if there is a particular location in northern Taiwan that you would like to see, post your suggestion and I will attempt to film it. I could even come and make a film about you!

A bit of a warning. I am going to moderate this blog quite mercilessly. If material is grossly inacurate or not aesthetically pleasing at all, I will delete it. Sorry. The aim here is to produce something of quality. You will probably discover that by attempting to create something correct and beautiful in Chinese you will remember the language associated with it much better, probably because by doing so you will have made the material meaningful to you.

This project of course assumes some basic knowledge of Mandarin. Absolute beginners will probably find much of it quite challenging. More advanced students will appreciate the opportunity to consolidate what they already know.

Personally I am not particularly eager to "explain" things in grammatical terms but rather to provide enough meaningful repetition so that nuances of usage can be aquired naturally.

People with no particular interest in learning Hanyu Pinyin but with an interest in gaining an impressionistic view of what life is like inside the Chinese speaking world might also appreciate this blog. Those with no interest in either might come back for the photographs and videos anyway.

Oh, and this is the Pinyin project, not the Hanzi project. Post written in Hanzi (Chinese chracters) will probably be deleted (unless they are accompanied by fabulous photographs) because I cannot read them at all and will have to consult my my sometimes quite irritable translator;)

Chinese is of course an extraordinarily complicated topic but fortunately some excellent introductory literature on the subject already exists. I see no reason to even attempt a discussion of the language, and what it is like to learn it, in broad terms when such wonderful material such as
Why Chinese is so Damn Hard by David Moser already exists.

Most students of Mandarin will already be familiar with this text. In any event I offer it here again in case anyone is still wondering as to the advisability of attempting to create a pinyin only forum such as this one.

The student of Chinese has three alternatives, the first two of which raise serious difficulties:

1) Study the character system (Hanzi). This is incredibly difficult and time consuming.

2) Study using Pinyin only. The main difficulty here, of course, is that you remain essentially illiterate in the Chinese world. There is a second, much less obvious difficulty though and that is that you will almost never have the opportunity to integrate the four skills (reading, writting, listening, speaking). The longer you study the more you realize that the lack of reading material and the lack of opportunities to communicate meaningfully in the written language seriously affects your listening and speaking ability. Responding, however meakly, to that difficulty, to that need, is what the Pinyin project is for.

3) The third alternative of course is to make use of pinyin as much as possible while still making a greater or lesser effort to study Hanzi (the character system). However, unless you are quite young, possesed of a phenomenol memory, incredibly motivated, working on the basis of an effective learning system and prepared to invest thousands of hours of study time you will NEVER be able to read and write anywhere near all of the things you can say and understand aurally, something you can probably do already if you have been studying with pinyin.


The next link is a quick, light primer. I would recommend it with the caveat that someone with a better eye and ear than me could probably find a couple of small errors. Indeed you could probably find a couple yourself. It is still a decent little package, I think.


There will be people who want a more analytical, academic view of the pinyin system and those who do could do worse I suppose than to look here though honestly I think that if you are just listening to spoken Mandarin and reading along with a Pinyin script you will likely acquire a natural feel for the system anyway. It deosn't hurt to look at descriptions of how the system works but it's no substitute for reading along as you listen to mostly comprhensible material

Bard on the Beach

Zhei4 bu4 ying3pian4 mei2you3 dui4hua4.
(This film has no conversation.)



DAN1ZI4 MING2DAN1
(Vocabulary List)
Zhei4 - This
bu4 - Measure word for films
ying3pian4 - film
mei3you3 - (do/does) not have
dui4hua4 - conversation

Zhei4 bu4 ying3pian4 mei2you3 dui4hua4.

Pinyin Postcards

Pinyin Postcards (PPC) are photographs with a caption. In the beginning a lot of my photographs will follow the same or similar formats. "This is a picture of....." "I took this picture....." etc. Repitition, of course, is the soul of learning. Slowly the entries will become longer and more complex but only as words and structures are fully aquired. I would suggest that others observe this pattern.

Rude or pornographic comments or images will be deleted immediately.

Hua1

Zhe4 shi4 hua1 de* zhao4pian4.
(This is a picture of a flower.)
Zhe4 zhang1 zhao4pian4 shi4 wo3 pai1 de*.
(This picture is one that I took.)
wo3 xi1wang4 ni3 xi3huan1.
(I hope you like.)



DAN1ZI4 MING2DAN1
(Vocabulary List)
zhe4 - this
shi4 - is
hua1 - flower
de* - grammar bit
zhao4pian4 - picture

zhe - this
zhang - measure word for pictures
zhao4pian4 - picture
shi4 - is
wo3 - I
pai1 - took (as in took a picture)
de* - grammar bit

wo3 - I
xi1wang4 - hope
ni3 - you
xi3huan1 - like


Zhe4 shi4 hua1 de* zhao4pian4. Zhe4 zhang1 zhao4pian4 shi4 wo3 pai1 de*. wo3 xi1wang4 ni3 xi3huan1.

Youtube Videos

Most of mine so far are more like snippets of life from Taiwan. If you woud like to view them click this

Under the screen you will see an attempted transciption of the dialogue for some of the videos. Click the arrows to the right and the full attempted transcription will appear. I will try to transcribe the dialogue from the videos, though, of course that is a lot more demanding than writing captions for photographs and mistakes will naturally occur. Essentially what I intend to do is to capture people's voices while I film this or that point of interest etc. You can see that is what I did with the FREE Chinese video. This will definietly be a more free-wheeling affair than the Pinyin Postcards project but will be valuable I think precisely because it will capture native speakers conversing spontaneously.

Another method would be to perform scripted material, which of course will be done much more carefully and with the aim of slowly expanding on known material.

I will delete rude comments and pornographic images and links from the youtube account as well. I don't mean to be prudish but definitely want to avoid those sorts of associations.

Thanks.