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Q: In China, is pinyin taught to young children alphabetically or using a 'look and say' strategy?
I'm doing my honours thesis in psycholinguistics and I'm interested in the way that pinyin is taught in Chinese schools.
Are students taught pinyin in an 'A, B, C' way, where they learn the letters of pinyin separately and then combine the letters to read other pinyin words? Or, do they learn each piynin word individually as a 'whole entity' without paying too much attention to the individual letters?
Hope that makes sense! Any insight would be very greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
11 years 29 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
I am Chinese. We learn the letters of pinyin separately and then combine the letters to read other pinyin words.
First, we learn Chinese phonetic alphabets,
Part 1,
b p m f d
t n l g k
h j q x zh
ch sh r z c
s y w
Part 2,
a o e i u
ü ai ei ui ao
ou iu ie üe er
an en in un
ang
eng ing ong
Part3,
zhi chi shi ri zi ci si yi wu yu ye yue yuan yin yun ying
Each of them has four tones. I think tones are the most difficult part for foreigners to learn.
We recite those phonetic alphabets, when we see the real pinyin, we can pronounce it. For instance, " piao liang" " p" in part one, "i" in part two, " ao" in part two, I already know how to pronounce " p" " i" " ao", so I know how to pronounce " piao" too.
Good luck with your thesis.
chinalinguist:
Thank you! That was exactly the kind of information I was looking for. Do you know if this is this the teaching method used all throughout China?
I asked my classmates, they said they don't quite remember, It has been something like 16 years since we studied that. But they said yes first, haha. I think it's the same everywhere. I am from the south, I asked one classmate from the central China, and one from the very north, Inner Mongolia, they said yes, they studied phonetic alphabets first.
chinalinguist:
Thanks so much again for the information! It makes sense that pinyin would be taught alphabetically in most places- I think that even if you were taught using the 'look and say' whole word strategy most children would probably figure out the underlying alphabetic system. Thanks again!!
