New Resource: “Sing Out Joyfully” Bk. Pīnyīn Web Material With Music

Those who have recently attended a Mandarin circuit assembly will have come to know that the songs used in this service year’s Mandarin circuit assemblies are from the new songbook, entitled, in English, “Sing Out Joyfully” to Jehovah. (It turns out that this is why, as mentioned in an earlier post, the official Chinese material available at that time for the new “Sing Out Joyfully” songbook was only partially complete—it first made available ahead of time only the songs that would be used in this service year’s Mandarin circuit assemblies.) As of this writing, however, no official Pīnyīn material is available for this new songbook, “Sing Out Joyfully” to Jehovah.

Also, with the official Pīnyīn PDF songbook files that are available, having to share limited display real estate with Chinese characters as well as with musical notation has forced the Pīnyīn text to be rendered in relatively 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 Out Joyfully” Bk.
  (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 Out Joyfully” Book Links (tiandi.info/sjj)

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 in the above resource for songs 13, 17, 59, 126, and 127. This covers the songs used in the afternoon portion of the 2017-2018 Circuit Assembly Program​—With Circuit Overseer, with the theme “Don’t Give Up in Doing What Is Fine!” (While the old songbook (Sing to Jehovah) could be used for the songs in the morning portion of this program, the songs in the afternoon portion of this program are only available in the new songbook (“Sing Out Joyfully” to Jehovah).) More material will be added as time allows.

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

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.