“Pīnyīn Was Plan A” Article Revised

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Basically, compared to those in the standard program who were just taught Pīnyīn for a couple of months or so purely as a phonetic aid for pronouncing characters, the students who were allowed to use Pīnyīn on its own as a writing system for a couple of years or so not only did significantly better in learning the language and in learning the Chinese characters, they also did significantly better overall academically. This is not surprising to me, since language is needed to learn and progress in any and every other field of learning. As former UN interpreter Wu Wenchao said,

Chinese language is difficult to learn in comparison with alphabetic languages. …Chinese students work very hard and would have to spend two more years [some have said even longer] in learning in order to reach the same level of a Western intellectual. …The difficulty in learning is analogous to long boot-up time in computer terminology, which means system delay in becoming operational.

In view of the above, I can’t help but wonder how well those learning Mandarin for the Mandarin field can do who just keep on using Pīnyīn on its own as a writing system, instead of stopping and moving on to characters after some arbitrary length of time. Since Jehovah’s organization is now providing official Pīnyīn versions of the core publications, and since many unofficial Pīnyīn-containing resources are available as well (as discussed more extensively below), Pīnyīn-using Mandarin field language learners now actually do not have to divert years of additional time to learn the relatively complex Chinese characters. Also, they do not have to put forth additional constant, ongoing effort to remember the Chinese characters they’ve learned, and to learn new ones. (And if they do choose to learn some Chinese characters, they could do so more effectively than they could without the assistance of Pīnyīn.) Mandarin field language learners who just use Pīnyīn on its own as a writing system can focus more on the information being communicated in the publications, that they in turn need to communicate to those in the field, without having to expend so much time and mental effort on language technicalities. Such ones should do significantly better overall in the Mandarin field, just as the Z.T. students mentioned above did significantly better overall academically.