Should you learn pinyin or characters first?

Pinyin for a few weeks, then characters, with pinyin kept for checking.

By Mandarin The WildUpdated 14 October 20264 min read

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What the classroom studies found

At the University of Pennsylvania, two sections of the same first-year course started characters three weeks apart. After a year, the group that began with three weeks of pinyin told Mandarin sounds apart better and spoke more fluently, and the two groups read and wrote characters about as well. Packard (1990), Effects of time lag in the introduction of characters into the Chinese language curriculum, The Modern Language Journal 74(2).

A longer wait went the other way. In a middle-school study, a group that started characters only in the second semester did worse at the end of the year on reading comprehension and on writing characters than a group that had characters from the start. Knell and West (2017), To delay or not to delay: the timing of Chinese character instruction for secondary learners, Foreign Language Annals 50(3). That group also had about 10 fewer hours of character teaching, and per hour the two did about the same. Krashen (2017), Early vs. delayed introduction of Chinese characters in beginning Mandarin classes: is the “early advantage” due to more instructional hours?, Foreign Language Annals 50(4).

先学拼音还是先学汉字？

hànzì: “Pinyin first, or characters first?”

汉hàn字zì

Noun

Chinese character

Also written 漢字

So the start matters less than keeping at both. A short pinyin start costs nothing in reading; months without characters do.

Pinyin alone can't tell words apart

Pinyin writes how a word sounds, and Chinese has few sounds for many words. We took the most common words in Chinese web text and counted how many of the words on a page share every syllable and tone with another common word. FineWeb-2, the web text we counted (its Mandarin part, cmn_Hani).

The most common words	Words on a page that sound exactly like another of them	Without tone marks
1,000	27%	46%
5,000	39%	58%
20,000	43%	63%

这是你的书吗？

shì: “Is this your book?”

是shì

Grammar word

is; am; are (links two things); yes

是 (to be), 事 (a matter), 市 (a city) and 式 (a style) are all shì, fourth tone. In characters you see which one at a glance. In pinyin you work it out from the sentence, and without tone marks, as most people type, almost half the common words on a page have a twin.

Few syllables, many characters

The 2,500 most common characters make up 97.3% of the characters on a page. The 2,175 of them our dictionary reads on their own use just 384 syllables, or 954 counting tones: about two characters for every toned syllable. The fourth-tone jì alone is 16 of them, among them 计, 技, 记, 际, 济 and 季.

That is why learning the sounds well pays off: each syllable you can hear and say is the sound of several characters.

Characters repeat sooner than you think

Words are built from characters you have already met. We took the 2025 HSK word list and checked each level's new words against the characters of the levels before it. HSK: the official site of the Chinese Proficiency Test.

HSK level	New words	New characters	New words written only with characters met before
1	307	248	–
2	202	123	31%
3	493	284	29%
4	994	441	34%
5	1,581	431	58%
6	1,782	413	68%

By the end of HSK 3 you have met 655 characters, and they are 66% of the characters on an ordinary Chinese web page. From HSK 5 on, most new words are made only of characters you already know, so each new word is easier than the last.

A plan that fits the evidence

Weeks 1–3: sounds. Learn pinyin and the tones with the pinyin chart and the pinyin trainer, until you can hear and say every syllable.
Then characters, every day. Read short stories at your level in the Library, in characters.
Look at the character first, then check the pinyin. Learners who saw a character for five seconds before its pinyin and meaning learned it faster than those who saw all three at once. Chung (2002), Effective use of Hanyu Pinyin and English translations as extra stimulus prompts on learning of Chinese characters, Educational Psychology 22(2). In the Library and the reader, point at a word to see its pinyin and meaning, or press 拼 to put pinyin above a whole passage and press it again to take it away.

How we counted

Word and character frequencies are our engine's counts of the Mandarin part of FineWeb-2, a large collection of web pages, each word read with its dictionary's first reading. FineWeb-2, the web text we counted (its Mandarin part, cmn_Hani). "Sounds exactly like" means the same syllables with the same tones. Character shares count every character inside every word. HSK levels are the 2025 syllabus; a word's characters count as met once any word at a lower level uses them.

Questions

Should I learn pinyin or characters first?

Start with pinyin for a few weeks to get the sounds right, then add characters and keep using both. In a university study, a three-week pinyin start helped listening and speaking with no loss in reading.

Can I learn Chinese with only pinyin?

For speaking, for a while. For reading, no: in our count of Chinese web text, 27% of the words on a page sound exactly like another common word, and 46% do once tone marks are dropped.

How many characters do I need to read Chinese?

The 2,500 most common characters are 97% of the characters on a page. The 655 characters in HSK 1–3 words already cover 66%.

Sources

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