The Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Scheme was adopted by the Fifth Session of the First National People's Congress on February 11, 1958. It was the product of the development and extension of the Chinese language modernization movement, such as the cutting of Chinese characters and the Latinization of Chinese characters in the late Qing Dynasty.


Since its promulgation, it has played an important role in annotating Chinese characters, promoting Putonghua, formulating minority languages and guiding foreigners to learn Chinese.


The scheme basically embodies the principles of science, conciseness and practicality, but some aspects are still worth discussing. This paper puts forward some personal opinions on the phonetic notation of Chinese Pinyin and discusses with you.


I. The Position of Phonetic Notes


Chinese characters are all 2 bytes, and Pinyin bytes range from 1 to 8. Obviously, Pinyin can not be labeled in a neat correspondence with Chinese characters in both upper and lower positions. The same is true for words.


1. The general method is to mark up and down. In this way, the Chinese characters, Pinyin and Pinyin have to be separated by long or short and disorderly intervals. For example, Yang Jizhou's "Chinese Course" (Volume I, Volume II, Beijing Language and Culture University, August 1999, the first edition) and so on.


2. There are also Chinese characters separated from Chinese Pinyin, a section of Chinese Pinyin, a section of Chinese characters, Chinese characters and Chinese Pinyin can be on the same page or different pages. For example, Lu Jianji's Primary Chinese Textbook (the first edition of February 2003) and so on.


3. There are also Chinese text and Pinyin not on the same page number. For example, Tao-chung Yao's "Chinese Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing" (Cheng & Tsui Company, Boston, USA, 1997 edition) and so on. Students who use such textbooks will have a common problem: after they have finished learning such textbooks, they still face textbooks with only Chinese characters.


4. Some textbooks of Chinese as a foreign language use Chinese characters and Pinyin to appear each other. That is to say, the text is entirely Chinese characters, and then Chinese characters and Pinyin appear in each other's phonetic manuscripts. For example, Tian Haohao et al.'Practical Quick Mandarin (Volume 2)'(Shaanxi Normal University Press, March 2002, 1st Edition)


For the editors, the workload is very heavy.


2. Simultaneous Marking of English


As the largest foreign language in China, English has a strong influence. It has become a habit for people to read Latin letters into English pronunciation.


1. If the textbook "Chinese, spelling, English" are marked out (three lines in total), the page appears loose and disorderly without aesthetic feeling, redundant words and redundant sentences are difficult to concise, which inevitably causes dazzling and difficult to adapt to the learners.


2. In addition, in order to avoid confusion between spelling and English, or to simplify the screen, almost all films and TV dramas simply do not annotate Pinyin, but only Chinese characters and English. The same is true of CCTV's "Happy Learning Chinese", which is undoubtedly unfavorable for helping foreigners understand the plot and learn Chinese.