To follow up on my previous post I decided to check on books in Pinyin and immediately found one written in 2010.
This book of short stories is entirely in Pinyin. It does not contain even one Chinese character.
The entire book is available for free on this site. LINK
I read the first chapter - Dàshuǐ Guòhòu. I could read and comprehend the entire chapter. Anyone who has attained HSK level 4 will be able to read it.
What are some reasons why some people believe that pinyin in Mandarin is not useful?
The above was a question on Quora.
Jojo Dennis Lee answered as below:
Pinyin is hard to read and write specially for English and Spanish speaking people. This is because the letters that are used are pronounced differently. For example, 北京 which was originally named in English as Peking and later changed to Beijing to adopt to Pinyin. But the pronunciation is actually “Pei Ching” or “Pay Tsing”. Another example is 道 (Dào in Pinyin) which means road but is actually pronounced as Tao. There are no B, D, G, J, V, X, Z sounds in Mandarin.
Pinyin was designed for people in China who don’t speak English. But for people who already know English, it is confusing and will mispronounce it.
6 years ago, someone on Quora had asked: Which is better when learning Chinese: characters without Pinyin or Pinyin without characters?
Yong Wen San replied as follows.
If you are serious about learning the Chinese language, then you should aim to shed pinyin from your system as soon as possible.
For the beginner learner, especially one who is not immersed in a Chinese-speaking environment, pinyin does serve as a useful tool for learning the pronunciation of characters and words in Modern Standard Chinese. But that is all it should be seen as - a tool to aid learning pronunciation. I take issue with anyone who makes the sweeping statement that you can “learn Chinese using pinyin”. That will only help you with the spoken modern Chinese language, and even then, it will only take you as far as some basic phrases - ordering food at an eatery, buying something from a grocery store, asking for directions, etc. If your ambitions in “learning Chinese” only go that far, then fine, you can stop reading here.
