Pinyin: the proof is in the pudding
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Mok Ling sent me an article from China Times with the following percipient observations:
Today I'm bringing you this short article for LL. A Korean pop idol, Solar — that's her stage name, Mandarinized as 頌樂; her real name is 김용선 (Hanja: 金容仙), romanized Kim Yongsun) — has made headlines for speaking very fluent Mandarin after just 7 months of learning it. She has also released a full song in Mandarin with Taiwanese artist 9m88 and taken countless interviews with Taiwanese media in Mandarin as well (see this "What's in My Bag" interview with Vogue Taiwan.)
Solar's secret (other than apparently practising 4 hours every day) is, of course, bypassing characters altogether. On this Weibo post (3rd image [click to open and enlarge]) she reveals that she's been learning Mandarin purely using Pinyin all this time, and even strictly observing the spelling rules!
It's certainly a feat, and another mark on the scoreboard for the "ZT" method.
I wouldn't say that Solar's Mandarin is perfect, but after learning it for just seven months, I would have to declare that her command of the language is amazing. Her delivery is fluent, natural, and confident. Solar's Mandarin doesn't sound "foreign" at all. She is able to express herself freely and with wit.
This is how Mandarin could become a rival to English as the world language, but I doubt that it will ever come close to challenging English in the coming decades. The Chinese people — including those who teach Mandarin as a foreign / second language — are too viscerally wedded to the cumbersome, hard-to-learn sinographs as the only proper way to write Sinitic languages. Never mind that Dungan and POJ Taigi have proven that you don't need the Chinese characters to command a spoken Sinitic language at native level, and you can use alphabetic scripts for writing too.
John Rohsenow, who is a regular reader and commenter on Language Log, is the authority on the ZT experiment, and Mark Swofford, long-time webmaster of Pinyin.info and the site's blog, Pinyin News, is also a contributor to Language Log.
Selected readings
- "How to learn to read Chinese" (5/25/08) — includes an explanation of ZT
- "Pinyin resurgent" (3/7/24)
- "Pinyin vs. English" (10/20/23)
- "Dissension over the role of the alphabet in literacy acquisition in the PRC" (4/11/21) — with extensive bibliography of relevant works
- "'They're not learning how to write characters!'" (11/5/21)
- John DeFrancis, "The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform", Sino-Platonic Papers, 171 (June, 2006), 1-26, with 3 exhibits, including the famous shopping list with pinyin used for common forgotten characters ("egg; shrimp; chives"); reprinted as an HTML version in Pinyin.info here. This outstanding article by the doyen of Chinese language teachers during the second half of the 20th century lays out clearly and systematically the past, present, and future of scipt reform as they stood at the beginning of the 21st century.
Anubis Bard said,
July 8, 2025 @ 2:51 pm
I actually found spoken Mandarin a delightful language to study my last year of college. But thanks to the pedagogues' insistence on me learning characters, it was like learning to swim with an anchor strapped to my leg, so I gave it up. Alas.
CuConnacht said,
July 8, 2025 @ 3:10 pm
I know that this cause was lost long ago, but I will go ahead anyway. In my youth there was a proverb "The proof of the pudding is in the eating," which makes sense. You don't judge a pudding by appearance or smell; etc; you have to eat it to know how good it is
Somehow that has become what is in the header of this LL post, which to me has never made sense.
Victor Mair said,
July 8, 2025 @ 3:21 pm
AI overview:
"Proof is in the pudding" is an idiom meaning that the real value or quality of something can only be judged after it has been tried, experienced, or tested. It's a shortened version of the older saying, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating". This original saying highlights that the best way to determine if something is good is to experience it directly.
Here's a breakdown:
Original saying: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."
Meaning: The true quality of something (like a pudding) can only be assessed by experiencing it (eating it).
"Proof" in this context: Refers to a test or trial.
"Pudding" in this context: In the original saying, "pudding" referred to a traditional British dessert, often a steamed cake that needed to hold its shape when turned out.
Modern usage: The shortened version, "proof is in the pudding," is widely used to emphasize that the success or failure of something is determined by its actual results, rather than by its appearance or how it's described.
VHM: Pinyin works.
David Morris said,
July 8, 2025 @ 3:24 pm
Google Ngram Viewer shows that 'proof is in the pudding' is now more common than 'proof of the pudding' in American English but not in British English or overall.
Further, usage of 'proof of the pudding' has two clear peaks in the early 1920s (American) and 1940s (both). The early 1940s correlates with World War 2, but the early 1920s was after World War 1 but before the Great Depression. Even with correlation/causation etc, it leaves the question of why people would use that phrase during wartime.
Thomas said,
July 9, 2025 @ 12:17 am
Her delivery is amazing, but she is of course in the entertainment business, so that is not all too surprising. It is certainly a feat to work well with the little knowledge of a language that one has.
I think it is not surprising that learning Mandarin solely based in pinyin works well if one has the resources. This is a nice proof of concept, albeit in a controlled and protected environment. However, unless the world changes fundamentally, learning Chinese this way is not really a good option, as it means being and willfully remaining illiterate.
Victor Mair said,
July 9, 2025 @ 3:26 am
@Thomas:
"being and willfully remaining illiterate"
Not at all. She is literate in Hangul, Pinyin, and English.
Peter Cyrus said,
July 9, 2025 @ 5:56 am
This forum is replete with experts on Chinese, so I'll ask for confirmation of my (mis)understandings. The founders of the Republic of China – Sun Yatsen / Zhongshan and his generation – believed strongly that writing Chinese in an alphabet would promote literacy, and this view was shared by the first generation of the Communists, like Mao. They were "internationalists".
I think – but please correct me if I'm wrong – that it was Chiang Kai-Shek who chose to "play the nationalist card" by retaining but simplifying the characters and using romanization as an auxuliary script for text entry, ordering, lookup, etc.
If that's true, the wheel will probably turn again one of these days.
Will H. said,
July 9, 2025 @ 8:13 am
Are there any good resources for learning Mandarin through Pinyin?
I find it immensely frustrating that every learning provider forces characters on one.
John Templeroot said,
July 9, 2025 @ 9:46 am
The communists were fully ready to romanize. They were talked out of it by Stalin! https://amp.scmp.com/article/715679/how-linguist-set-out-rewrite-chinese-history
Jonathan Smith said,
July 9, 2025 @ 11:08 am
Re: script reform in the early PRC, to further condense this earlier post, Mao (Romanization advocate) was strung along by Zhou Enlai and the Deep State — real change was never gonna happen.
Re: learning via Pinyin, sure it is clearly a much more efficient way to learn to speak Chinese — you could use e.g. Kubler's "Spoken Chinese"/"Speaking & Listening" textbooks. But without learning characters yes you are illiterate in China or Taiwan, full stop. And actually setting aside Chinese people — for whom characters are part and parcel of what Chinese is — students in (e.g.) the U.S. tend also to feel you're cheating them without the characters… and you probably are.
wgj said,
July 9, 2025 @ 11:52 am
It's interesting to see the hypothesis that its hard-to-learn writing system would be the main culprit of preventing Mandarin from becoming the world language, when English, the world language of our time, itself has a very hard-to-learn writing system due to its highly irregular spelling – harder than any other major language in the huge Indo-European family, I believe. And the native English language cultures are no less enthusiastically obsessed about this arcane and cumbersome aspect of their language than the Chinese are about theirs, as shown by the cult of spelling bee.
If we're proposing teaching Chinese without sinographs as a mainstream method, shouldn't we consequently also propose teaching English using the IPA only as a mainstream method?
Tom davidson said,
July 9, 2025 @ 4:21 pm
Being left-handed, I never has any problem learning how to write Chinese characters, traditional or simplfed.
Victor Mair said,
July 9, 2025 @ 7:41 pm
English spelling, hard as it is, cannot begin to compare with sinographs for difficulty. Have you mastered the latter yet? If not, go ahead and give them a try — if you have a decade to spare.
I know a lot of people who are atrocious English spellers, but they don't have any problem making themselves understood when writing in English, just use a lot of homophones. If you miss a few Chinese characters, even a few strokes, you're stuck. We've proven that many times over here on Language Log.
At least ten times harder that writing in English. You've invoked a specious argument.
The biggest crisis in Chinese language teaching right now is that virtually all students want to use Pinyin input in computers to "write" characters, whereas regressive teachers insist that they write them by hand. A few progressive teachers sympathize with the students and actually think / demonstrate that inputting by pinyin is more effective. The teachers who emphasize handwriting say, "It was hard for me to handwrite characters, so you should have the same experience. Suffering is good for you. It builds character!
Now, step back from your prejudice against phonetic writing and think what the point of this post is all about. Reflect on what I said about quick literacy via POJ and Dungan cyrillic. Do you want to keep the Chinese people script-bound for eternity? Fair enough, if that's what you really want for them. But do you also want to keep the world ignorant of Sinitic language forever, except for a miniscule handful of specialists?
Could Solar have become fluent in Mandarin in 7 months if she had been forced to learn it via 漢字?
John Swindle said,
July 9, 2025 @ 10:39 pm
As I write this, Will H.'s question remains: What are some good resources for (an English speaker) learning Mandarin through Pinyin? Fifty-five years ago we learned using John DeFrancis's textbook series published by Seton Hall University (Xī Dōng Dàxué! what a wonderful name!), but surely there's something more modern.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 9, 2025 @ 11:23 pm
^ again "Kubler's 'Spoken Chinese'/'Speaking & Listening' textbooks"
viz.
Beginning Spoken Chinese + Practice Essentials book
Intermediate Spoken Chinese + Practice Essentials book
newer (and which I haven't examined) are
Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening + Practice Book
Intermediate Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening + Practice Book
maybe someone else knows something about features unique to the newer books…
Chas Belov said,
July 9, 2025 @ 11:39 pm
Thank you for the references to Solar and 9m88; I'm about to add them to my Infectious Multilingual playlist.
I note both of them have songs in English, not just Korean or Mandarin.
Solar's song "Spit it out" which is mostly in Korean, code switches quite a bit into English and even a bit into Spanish. (I've encountered tri-lingual code switching in a song before, can't remember which song. Also in real life.)
At some point I plan to do a blog post on code switching in Asian popular music. Alas, as a non-linguist, it will be at the hobbyist level. But the idea is to have fun, not to be perfect.
wgj said,
July 10, 2025 @ 12:44 am
Dear Professor,
My question about using IPA only to teach English was not a rhetorical one, but a real question. I'm not at all opposed to teaching Chinese as a foreign language using Pinyin.
Victor Mair said,
July 10, 2025 @ 4:05 am
@wgj
IPA has been tried before, but it never catches on. Wonder why.
John Swindle said,
July 10, 2025 @ 4:32 am
@Jonathan Smith: Thanks!
KWillets said,
July 10, 2025 @ 4:49 pm
The book she holds up in the interview is for learning Chinese through dramas; I was curious if it had a mention of pinyin in the title, but no luck.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 10, 2025 @ 6:18 pm
Ah I see there is a sample of that book for viewing here; it appears to have characters / pinyin in parallel throughout. So you can (do) just ignore characters.
wgj's thought makes sense but the parallel is not IPA but rather English in some conventionalized phonemic spelling laik θis — this shift (and the one from characters to pinyin) is like escaping a local minimum — a (much) better place exists but paths out are (or seem) painful…
HS said,
July 10, 2025 @ 8:20 pm
Speaking of adopting a phonemic spelling system for English, this interesting story appeared in the UK Guardian a few days ago. I'd never heard of this Initial Teaching Alphabet and the problems it caused. I have been half expecting to see a post about this story appear here on Language Log.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 10, 2025 @ 8:50 pm
^ Fascinating. Results initially positive esp. among the socioeconomically disadvantaged, but in the end you have to transition to what's actually used and everyone hates the planners. (Choice educator quote: "Any teaching that is based on anything other than the reality of what has to be learned is a waste of time.") Compare/contrast with pinyin-to-learn-Chinese…
Thomas said,
July 11, 2025 @ 12:41 am
@ Jonathan Smith, thank you for summing up the issue in one sentence. Using only pinyin might be nice in theory, but currently one simply has to learn how to read the characters. Mei banfa
Bob Ladd said,
July 11, 2025 @ 4:40 am
@Jonathan Smith, @Thomas:
It's obviously true that the current reality is that you have to learn characters to function in Chinese, but the broader point behind VHM's many posts on this general topic is that Chinese is never going to come close to challenging English as an international lingua franca as long as that current reality continues. I think that's obviously true as well, though when I suggest it to Chinese people they often resist the idea and seem surprised that the writing system might be an obstacle to the wider adoption of Chinese internationally.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 11, 2025 @ 12:00 pm
@Bob Ladd
I heartily agree and just above suggested compare *and* contrast to ITA. One important "contrast" is that Pinyin is — for practically all of its users — *not* an orthography for a language spoken natively but a tool leveraged in learning a language from scratch. So the question is how to balance use of this important tool with the reality of characters. One thing instructors can (IMO in most contexts should) do is require only reading knowledge of characters. Bringing in the script later is also an idea (tried it), but students (understandably!) want to "learn Chinese"…
So I would say yes Pinyin World constitutes a better (?? or maybe "more efficient") minimum but one that can't be accessed for reasons including that educated native users / Chinese society at large are (again understandably!) we(l)dded to the status quo (a point where "compare" to ITA is apt…)
Michael Watts said,
July 12, 2025 @ 2:00 am
Do we really believe that the number of foreign students of Mandarin exceeds the number of Chinese children who speak it natively?
John Rohsenow said,
July 12, 2025 @ 2:03 am
"The communists were fully ready to romanize. They were talked out of it by Stalin! https://amp.scmp.com/article/715679/how-linguist-set-out-rewrite-chinese-history"
Sorry? The linked article is mostly about the late Zhou Youguang's contributions to HYPY romanization and does not say that the Chinese "were talked out of it by Stalin!" Did I miss something?
KWillets said,
July 12, 2025 @ 12:17 pm
@Jonathan thanks for the link; I skimmed through the sample, which includes the introduction, but didn't find any mention of Pinyin (병음). It appears to be introduced without explanation.
The book has an English title "233 Essential Patterns for Conversation in Chinese Drama", and it's mainly that. Grammar points are introduced with little explanation and few examples; it's more of a supplement than a learning text. I suspect she's having a lot of difficulty turning these patterns into general use.
Emphasis of grammar teaching between SOV and SVO languages is my own personal hill to die on — Pinyin is of course welcome if it allows more focus on that.
Jinfu Ke said,
July 14, 2025 @ 6:31 pm
The Guardian article on Initial Teaching Alphabet does raise an interesting question. Would its alleged confusion effect be caused by its similarity to orthography? Cf., I have not heard any cases where Pinyin has caused students to mess up with Hanzi writing (which carries on for a lifetime), since they are so drastically different, there is no straightforward way to "transfer" Pinyin spelling to Hanzi. But since English orthography is somehow phonetic (although irregularly), the case of using ITA, essentially a "revised orthography" — which is also Latin alphabet-based and to a large extent preserves orthography — may easily cause students to "transfer" ITA spelling to orthography, when students have to learn the latter. IPA, if used, may cause the same "transfer", although this is pure speculation.