Howto: Mandarin in Latin characters

May 9, 2006 2:05 PM

I'm presently working on a set of Pimsleur Mandarin CDs, and the Pimsleur system is spoken-only. I'm dying to write down what I've learned (I'm addicted to practicing with note cards, I don't feel that I'm really working hard on a language until I have a thick deck of dirty, dog-eared note cards.) But I'm nowhere near ready to write stuff down in Chinese characters. Is there a standard or widely used way of transliterating Mandarin into Latin characters, and somehow also indicating the tonal content?
posted by jfuller to Education (9 answers total)

pinyin
posted by the cuban at 2:06 PM on May 9, 2006

The International Phonetic Alphabet to the rescue, though it's not Chinese --> Latin specific.
posted by kmel at 2:31 PM on May 9, 2006

pinyin is pretty much the most useful.

mandarin tools
zhongwen
posted by kcm at 2:55 PM on May 9, 2006

Hey I just wanted to say--breaking in to the Chinese characters isn't as hard as it looks, it just takes repetition. When I started Chinese, it really was detrimental to rely on the pinyin more than characters--a bad habit and very difficult to break. Also, I found that if you learn the meaning behind the radicals (smaller parts that make a character) in the beginning, while you are learning the vocabulary itself, the characters serve as the best possible tool in helping you remember tone/meaning/etc. Anyway, good luck--Mandarin rules!
posted by ibeji at 5:12 PM on May 9, 2006

What ibeji says. Learn the background of the characters, and how they fit together. I LOVED this book for learning to understand characters and how to write them. I highly highly recommend it.

I was also really happy with some other books and online resources that I wrote about here on another AskMe post.

(What would really help is one of those things, like there is for Kanji, that you can use to translate words on the fly in your browser. Does that exist for Chinese? Vietnamese?? Those are the ones I want...)
posted by whatzit at 6:22 PM on May 9, 2006

you could also use the phonetic mandarin alphabet (bopomofo)used that is used in Taiwan. It has the advantage that it gets you comfortable writing chinese characters and you don't try to pronounce things in english. The downside is it is only used in Taiwan so if you end up taking lessons elsewhere you will be forced to learn pinyin.

This is my favorite book for learning to write chinese characters if you decide to give that a go.
posted by kechi at 6:24 PM on May 9, 2006

Use Pinyin. Every child in china learns it, as far as I know.
posted by delmoi at 11:44 PM on May 9, 2006

Btw, get a copy of the practical chinese reader and This flashcard program, which is keyed to the chapters in the book.

I happened to use PCR as my texbook in college and this program helped me re-memorize like 120 Hanzi in like 4 hours.

Seriously, it totally pwns.
posted by delmoi at 11:46 PM on May 9, 2006

Good question and answers, thanx to all. (I'm also doing the Pimsleur Mandarin - it's quite good.)
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:36 AM on May 10, 2006