New Resource: Sing to Jehovah—New Songs Pīnyīn Web Material With Music

While we greatly appreciate the availability of the official Pīnyīn songbook PDF files, the PDF format was conceived of in a world dominated by paper. Unfortunately, that means that PDF files are often not optimal for reading on the mobile devices that are now so prevalent among Mandarin field publishers.

Also, especially with the official Sing to Jehovah—New Songs Pīnyīn PDF file, having to share limited display real estate with Chinese characters has forced the Pīnyīn to be rendered in small type that can be difficult to read, especially for older people.

A new resource is now available that seeks to help with these challenges:

• Sing to Jehovah—New Songs
  (Pīnyīn, Music, Web)
  (proofread, mobile-friendly,
  links for getting around,
  prezoomed to use full screen width,
  easy-to-read font)
  (Info re offline viewing and printing)
  
• Short Links:
  Links ▶ Publications ▶ Books ▶
  Sing to Jehovah—New Songs Links (tiandi.info/snnw)

The above Pīnyīn songbook material has been designed to be mobile-first, so it automatically adjusts itself to be optimal for reading on mobile devices of various shapes and sizes, including tablets and smartphones. A couple of the ways in which it does so are:

• Song material automatically loads “prezoomed” to take full advantage of the width of your device’s display, so as to render the Pīnyīn lyrics in as large a size as possible.
• The typeface chosen for the Pīnyīn lyrics is one that is especially legible at smaller text sizes.

So far, material is available for songs 136 to 140. More material will be added as time allows. (Interestingly, I noticed that the official Chinese material available so far for the new “Sing Out Joyfully” songbook is only partially complete, a practice that has long been followed with unofficial resources in order to allow whatever material has been completed to be made available for use, without having to wait until an entire publication’s material has been completed. As far as I am aware, this is the first time this practice has been applied to the official resources.)

The introduction for the above resource explains why it’s good to use Pīnyīn as a writing system on its own.

The Pīnyīn lyrics in the above resource do not have Pīnyīn Plus flashcard functionality because they need to stay aligned with the musical notation. If time allows, Pīnyīn lyrics in the future may also be presented on their own, in which case they can offer Pīnyīn Plus flashcard functionality.