Hanyu Pinyin （汉语拼音）for Preschoolers

Hanyu pinyin (汉语拼音) is often introduced to preschoolers. So what's hanyu pinyin?

What is hanyu pinyin?

Hanyu means Chinese and pinyin means pronunciation. Hanyu pinyin refers to how to pronounce Chinese words using romanized alphabets and diacritic. To simplify the explanation of hanyu pinyin, you can think of it as phonics in Chinese, with the pronunciation written using the English alphabets. How you pronounce hanyu pinyin is the same as how you pronounce 汉语拼音. 

Chinese is all about characters. How do you determine what sound it is if you don't know the words? This is where pinyin comes in. Hanyu pinyin was developed by a group of Chinese linguists back in the 1950s. They gave each letter or groups of letters a distinct sounds. When put together together with the accents, one can determine the actual sound of the word. And the best part about pinyin, unlike phonics which have a lot of special cases or exceptions, in pinyin, the sound are more or less the same for all scenarios. Meaning if you know the sound of "ong" for pinyin, it applies all the time whether you put it with "s" or "b" and so on.

Three Components of Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音)

An example of a hanyu pinyin is this below. 

Notice there are 3 components of hanyu pinyin:

• initial sound (声母）
• final sound （韵母）
• tones - there are 4 tones for Chinese or 5 if you include the "light" tone (一声， 二声， 三声， 四声， 轻声）

How to learn Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音)?

Learning hanyu pinyin involves a few steps. You should learn

1. initial sound
2. final sound
3. how to blend initial and final sound together
4. determine the actual sound based on the tone

Do you notice how similar it is to phonics (except for step 4, since English doesn't have tones)? 

One Syllable per Chinese Character

Another interesting thing to note about Chinese is that one character only has 1 syllable, and so one pinyin the character. A word can have more than one character, and the number of characters determine the number of "syllable" in that word. For example toys is known as wanju in Chinese. This word is made up for 2 character, and so there are 2 pinyin (one for each character).

When should you introduce hanyu pinyin for preschoolers?

Personally, I find learning hanyu pinyin meaningless if you don't know any Chinese words. Hence, hanyu pinyin is usually taught when a child has some knowledge of Chinese (i.e. knows some vocabulary), but still at the initial stage of learning where having the Chinese pinyin will allow them to now the pronunciation of the many Chinese words that they have yet learnt.

In most preschools, hanyu pinyin is learnt in the second year of kindergarten and the first year of grade school (primary one). 

Where is Hanyu Pinyin used?

You won't see a Chinese book in hanyu pinyin. Many words can have the same pinyin, and writing them in pinyin instead of Chinese character is going to be ambiguous. Chinese books are written in Chinese characters. Those books for learners may have hanyu pinyin in them to aid in learning. While you will see mainly Chinese characters in Chinese books, there are some instances where the knowledge of hanyu pinyin is useful (beyond the learning and pronounciation). 

One of it is inputting the words using a computer or mobile device. Our laptops have alphabets for us to input words in, but not the strokes of Chinese character. While some Chinese laptops have "strokes" for you to input the word, if yours don't have such feature, then you will probably need to input it using other means, and hanyu pinyin is one of the means to type Chinese words. 

Another use of hanyu pinyin is in Chinese dictionary. Alright, I must admit I don't know whether physical dictionary will still be a thing in years to come (it's so much easier to do a search on the internet), but for now, the words in some Chinese dictionaries are arranged alphabetically according to their pinyin (just like English dictionary).