TAFT: A new version of pinyin to help foreign Mandarin learners remember tones

Abstract

A group of 30 native English-speaking participants were taught in a single session how to produce tones in Mandarin Chinese and memorized a set of 24 English words along with their Chinese translation presented in an alphabetic script. For half of the participants, the alphabetic script took the form of the standardly used “pinyin” where tonal information is depicted by a diacritic line above the vowel. For the other half, the script represented the tones as letters such that each syllable and its tone formed an integrated unit. This method was named “Tones as Alphabetically Formed Tokens” or “TAFT”. Using a cued-retrieval task where the Mandarin word was to be pronounced in response to its English translation, it was found that the TAFT method was significantly better than standard pinyin for retaining both the syllable and its tone. This was true when testing both immediately after learning and after a week’s delay. It is suggested that TAFT is potentially a more effective tool for mediating the teaching of Mandarin as a foreign language than is the pinyin script that is currently used.