CHINESE:   ENGLISH ~ PINYIN TC

Welcome to the ENGLISH ~ PINYIN TC area at Project HappyChild. Thanks to the translation (and checking) help currently being provided by people across the world (all giving their time and expertise entirely free of charge) we are in the process of building a *huge* area of free translation worksheets for children and students to use, across an increasing range of languages.

We're delighted to say that the English-Pinyin-TC vocabulary worksheets have now gone on line - 20th February 2013. Our endless thanks for all their hard work go to Shalem Lee (translating) and Ron Lee (checking) who have made possible this incredible interlinked English - Pinyin - Chinese-characters resource.

Areas covered include: food and drink, your home, garden, family, the human body [everything from the body's inner systems to hair, make-up and clothing], animals, birds and insects [including animal sounds], travel, holidays and sightseeing, cars and driving, tools and equipment, or school, office, sports and leisure, shopping, trees, countryside and general chit-chat. All in easy-to-manage blocks, each with about 10 new words or phrases.

The English-Pinyin-TC verb pages may not be available for some time yet, but the English-Pinyin-TC vocabulary worksheets can be used independently. All worksheets can be used for English-to-Pinyin-TC and Pinyin-TC-to-English.

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Simplified Chinese characters are the official written language in Mainland China, so most Mandarin speakers will use them, but in places like Hong Kong (where Cantonese is usually spoken) and Taiwan, the Traditional Chinese characters are still used for the actual written language. However, some Mandarin speakers can read Traditional characters, and some Cantonese speakers can read Simplified Characters.

The above description is what we started with, however the whole Mandarin/Cantonese situation is not that straightforward to grasp. To clarify as much as possible, Simplified Characters are the official written language in mainland China, so most Mandarin speakers in China would tend to use Simplified Characters. Hanyu Pinyin, which we have used in the Simplified Characters sets of worksheets on the site here, provides the pronunciation guide for Simplified Characters for Mandarin.

However in Taiwan, most people speak Mandarin but use Traditional Characters rather than Simplified Characters as the written form of the language - so the best Pinyin-type representation for the Traditional Characters used in Taiwan is also Hanyu Pinyin (which is what has been used for the worksheets for both Simplified Characters and Traditional Characters).

With regard to the Cantonese spoken in HongKong (where Traditional Characters are also used as the written form of the Chinese language) and where pronunciation is different, it would theoretically be possible to add HongKong Cantonese Pinyin (and to integrate with the other worksheet sets on line here) if enough people wanted to help with this, but we are hoping that the worksheets already provided (along with the verbs worksheets when these are ready) will be sufficient for basic Chinese-learning requirements.

If you are learning Mandarin with Simplified Characters this is linked from the pages here, here and here (each worksheet links to the other sets), and if you are learning Mandarin with Traditional Characters this is linked from the pages here, here and here (each worksheet links to the other sets). If you are learning Cantonese with Traditional Characters these are linked from the page here but you may need a teacher to guide re differences in pronunciation from the Pinyin provided here.

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With regard to Hanyu Pinyin pronunciation, we have been asked to include here the following notes:

There are 2 basic rules:
1) When there are two 3rd tones, the first one turns into 2nd tone.
e.g. 你好 (nǐ hǎo) [hello] is pronounced as ní hǎo
e.g. 老鼠 (lǎo shǔ) [rat] is pronounced as láo shǔ
2) When there are two 4th tones, the first one turns into 2nd tone.
e.g. 不是 (bù shì) [no] is pronounced as bú shì

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Special thanks go to Mario Becroft in New Zealand, for the original programming work which made this resource possible, and to David Booker in the UK, for accelerating the output of completed worksheet sets.

Project HappyChild / Freeway worksheets may be used as a non-commercial education resource, free of charge,
provided only that each worksheet is printed / photocopied without modification and includes the whole page as it appears on line.
[In 'My Computer' or 'Control Panel' de-select "print background colours and images", to reduce ink usage.]
Each worksheet should print onto a single A4 sheet: select print page 1 (only) and adjust % if required to reduce size.

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