Arkansas-raised Adam Callahan was forced to pick up a new language after his family moved to China for his father's job. The 14-year-old Callahan and his siblings enrolled in an international school, but they were still required to learn the local language – Chinese.
Callahan said he was overwhelmed and confused by the language. His first impression of Chinese was that "it looked like a bunch of lines on a piece of paper."
Chinese is known as one of the hardest languages to learn, and its complexity almost turned Callahan away from it.
"I had no idea. I was like, this is way too hard. I don't even want to learn this," he said.
But Pinyin, also known as the Chinese Romanization system, makes the learning process much easier, Callahan explained. As Chinese becomes one of the most spoken and frequently learned languages in the world, the Pinyin system helps non-native speakers better grasp the language.
Pinyin was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists, including the late Zhou Youguang, to popularize Putonghua, more commonly known as Mandarin. Yi-Hsien Liu, an assistant professor of Chinese language at USC, said Pinyin was first developed to tackle the illiteracy problem in China. The literacy rate was as low as 20 percent in the 1950s. It later was recognized by the International Organization for Standardization as an official Romanization system for the Chinese language.
Callahan said the first few months of learning Chinese focused solely on Pinyin and learning the basics, such as the four tones in Mandarin. He said Western language speakers like himself learn Roman numerals and letters because Chinese characters are like Egyptian hieroglyphics to him.
"To make that jump to immediately to something that doesn't have ABCDEFG, I think it's a little scary," Callahan said.
Pinyin provides a smoother transition from English to Chinese because the Roman letters are recognizable, Callahan explained. It also serves as an important stepping stone for learners to progress to a more advanced level of Chinese, Liu said.
"If students have some sort of speaking ability it boosts their confidence, so they can move onto the reading and writing parts, which are developed later," Liu said. "Pinyin is definitely the quickest way because they already have their ABCs."
Christopher Magriney, a Chinese language instructor at USC, said he usually starts off the class by introducing crucial background information on the Chinese language. Pinyin is one of those fundamentals. He said students find Chinese characters very difficult to learn and see Pinyin as a "life-saver."
Magriney also likes typing Chinese with Pinyin and said he can now type Chinese words as fast as English ones and with more ease.
"English is so much harder to spell because English has all these complications and crazy spellings," he said.
Although Callahan is no longer a student of Chinese, he said he still relies heavily on Pinyin. Callahan entered "I love you" in Pinyin into a dictionary app on his smartphone, and copied the Chinese characters on a piece of paper. A bunch of once-confusing lines now make sense to him.
Pinyin is widely adopted not in only the U.S. but also back in China, where textbooks are written in Chinese with a line of Pinyin below the characters. The Chinese Romanization system is a helpful tool, especially for learners who speak languages with Latin letters, but experts say there are limitations with Pinyin.
USC professor Liu explained that Pinyin is meant to "bridge the gap between English writing system with Chinese characters," but it sometimes adds to the mental burden on students to learn an extra language system. Liu emphasized the need to treat Pinyin as a medium, rather than a language itself. If students only master Pinyin without the writing system, "it's harder to push into real literacy," Liu said.
As China continues to expand and may potentially surpass the U.S. to become the world's biggest economy in the near future, experts foresee a growing demand to learn Chinese. Liu said there are many businessmen and women who want to learn Chinese and she sees opportunities to apply the language, especially in Southern California where there is a large Chinese presence.
Reach Staff Reporter Almond Li here, or follow her on Twitter.
Annenberg Media