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Books in pinyin | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| boudouris Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4430 days ago 12 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Greek, Indonesian, French, Mandarin | Message 1 of 5 20 June 2012 at 6:50pm | IP Logged |
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One of my most effective strategies when learning Spanish was to read a lot. I read
novels, even though I didn't understand them, until I did (obviously looking up words in the process). I think that the high amount of language exposure that reading brings was the key to that success. Now that I am learning Mandarin, there is obviously a problem, since I can't really read the text and I definitely can't learn new words from reading it. Does anyone know of a place I can find books written in pinyin (if they are even out there)? I don't want children's books, or books that are meant for teaching language. I would like to find novels, preferably ones that contain a variety of commonly used vocabulary and grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5002 days ago 245 posts - 421 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 2 of 5 21 June 2012 at 6:10am | IP Logged |
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Pinyin is just a crutch for learning to pronounce characters. So outside of dictionaries, children's books, and teaching texts, it's not going to appear all that often in published Chinese works.
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4489 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 3 of 5 21 June 2012 at 7:21am | IP Logged |
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You're still going to learn words from reading Chinese texts, for a simple reason: when you've learnt some characters, they will combine in other words that you don't know yet!
Reading Chinese has taught me a lot, but of course you'll need to learn some characters in the way. As for pinyin books, there are very few. What you can do however is get a tool to pinyin-ify a text, and read online stuff (or ebooks) that you've turned into pinyin yourself. It's been quite useful for me to use pinyin sentences in my flashcards, as it taught me to pay more attention to the tones of some words. Apart from that flashcard use, I'd still recommend you to do the real work and to learn to read real Chinese texts. It's not that hard, and it's rewarding! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4477 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 4 of 5 21 June 2012 at 8:29am | IP Logged |
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In Taiwan there is a newspaper called the Mandarin Daily News, or 國語日報 (Gúoyǔ rìbào). The stories are written in traditional characters, but annotated with the pronunciation in zhùyīn fúhào (注音符號) which is the equivalent of pinyin for Taiwan, commonly known as Bopomofo. It’s similar to Japanese kana and tends to fit very nicely above the characters (or alongside them if it’s a vertical text.) Other newspapers in Taiwan often have a page in the back with an annotated story or two – probably aimed at children. I’m not sure if you can find this sort of thing online, though.
Below is a link to a book of short stories in pinyin only – also from Taiwan, surprisingly enough. Generally speaking vermillon is right, learning the characters is part of learning Chinese. Of course it takes a lot longer to get to the point where you can read texts freely than it does for languages like Spanish. So you may just have to choose a different strategy. Pinyin Info Edited by viedums on 21 June 2012 at 8:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| boudouris Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4430 days ago 12 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Greek, Indonesian, French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 5 21 June 2012 at 3:35pm | IP Logged |
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I realize that pinyin is meant to show pronunciation and not act as an official text,
that's what I want. Thanks to everyone for the help, though, and you all have motivated me to be a little less lazy and get started on learning characters too. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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