Do you guys think that pinyin above the characters helps or hinders your comprehension? Is a word really known only when you can recognize both the meaning and pinyin or rather if you know the meaning and have a rough pronunciation of the character?
Just want to see other people’s thoughts on the use of pinyin above the characters when using LingQ to learn mandarin,
I’m using a course book where the first few lessons had pinyin as the dominant form and characters smaller, then the reverse was used and by the time I reached book 2, the new dialogues are only in characters, with tone marks above (which is very helpful). I find that better, as I can write pinyin above words I still don’t know, while leaving the bulk of the text without pinyin. I find that after a while, pinyin becomes distracting. I also print out the whole new text in pinyin, then use that to practice writing the text in characters. On the first pass, there are lots of mistakes, but after copying out the whole text (looking only at the pinyin) I make fewer mistakes in my characters. I’ve been doing this for the last few months and it’s really improved my writing. Before that, I could hardly write any character off by heart.