Can Westerners use Chinese dictionaries?
If a Westerner wants to learn Chinese, he or she can best learn through a language called “pinyin”. Pinyin is a phonetic system that is considered a “romanization” of the Chinese language, and most of those who study CSL begin by learning pinyin. Even Chinese youngsters learn with pinyin since Chinese characters give no hint to their pronunciation. Mass literacy was not the goal of the ancient scholars. By teaching pinyin, students learn how to pronounce the characters. The learned pinyin characters and words can become a learning dictionary. There are some problems even with pinyin: The main disadvantage to romanization is that students often have preconceived ideas about the pronunciation of the Roman alphabet. For example, the Pinyin letter “q” has a “ch” sound, and it can take some effort to make this association. . When the student graduates from a workbook vocabulary list to a dictionary, more problems are encountered. Part of the problem with using a dictionary is that sooner or
