When you first start learning Mandarin, hanyu pinyin is an important pronunciation tool. Most teaching methods will start by teaching the meaning of each letter and letter combination in hanyu pinyin, which in fact is much more regular in its phonetic transcription than most European languages. Then, when you pick up new words, you’ll be wondering about the spelling in hanyu pinyin, so that you can get the pronunciation of the word in your head correctly. When you see a new character, you’ll ask: “what’s the hanyu pinyin?” so that you can get the pronunciation right.
In my experience, this reverses later. When you have gained some ability to converse in Mandarin, and want to type certain words, you’ll rely on your pronunciation to distill the hanyu pinyin transcription. Which in turn will lead the computer to suggest a number of characters.
I have found that many Singaporeans struggle with this. They do speak pretty decent Mandarin, but have a certain ‘local flavour’ to it, simply from speaking it by birth, which means that they find it hard to distinguish well between certain tones, such as:
‘x’ vs. ‘c’/’s’
’s’ vs. ’sh’
‘n’ vs. ‘ng’
Ironically, I find that I am at an advantage in this regard. Since I had no informal exposure to Mandarin before my learning program. In the first weeks, I was taught these fundamentals of pronunciation and hanyu pinyin well, and I’m reaping the rewards of it till this day.
