Note-Taking Assisted with Computers—A Practical Method to Build a Connection between Chinese Pinyin & Characters

Abstract

Chinese beginners often find themselves in struggling for learning complicated Chinese characters (also known as Hanzi), after the acquisition of Chinese pronunciation (Chinese Phonetic Alphabets, also called Pinyin). Actual experience of living and studying in China exposes a fact that people on daily basis are not using Pinyin to assist pronunciation. All means of social media only have Hanzi for people to recognize. The connection between Pinyin and Hanzi is a difficult part to accomplish for Chinese language beginners. Based on several years of teaching experience of Chinese language to speakers of other languages and working memory drill in English-Chinese interpretation, the author explores a practical way to build this connection between Pinyin and Hanzi by taking-notes using computers and mobile phones in class. In alliance with fun language teaching methodologies, i.e., the Audiolingual method, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) to reassure the memory rehearsal drill in association with imaginary situations. The research experiment results show that this method can stimulate beginners’ learning enthusiasm and arouse their confidence and initiative in the long-run Chinese language learning process and it can facilitate Chinese beginners to better communicate in the fast-changing social media.