Learning Zhuyin in 3 Days

This is my experience learning Zhuyin / BoPoMoFo / ㄅㄆㄇㄈ in just 3 days. I don’t mean this article to sound impressive, but rather to show that it’s not actually that hard to learn Zhuyin and given the minimal time commitment it’s probably worthwhile for people learning Chinese in Taiwan.

For anyone unfamiliar, Zhuyin is the phonetic system used in Taiwan for typing and teaching Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

So first of all, why in the world would you commit 3 days to this?

Why learn Zhuyin?

• Type faster on your phone. There are two main reasons why Zhuyin is faster to type with (on mobile anyway).
  1) Zhuyin is pretty well-organized: Initial sounds on the left, final sounds on the right. This means in many cases you don’t have to move the same finger to hit multiple keys.
  2) Many characters only require one or two Zhuyin glyphs. Example: 是 in Pinyin is shì (three key strokes) but in Zhuyin it’s ㄕ (one key stroke).
• Improve your pronunciation by avoiding English sound bias. Zhuyin is definitely not English, and this is a good thing. You won’t be tempted to sound things out as if they were English as is the case with Pinyin. Early Chinese students (my past self included) have a hard time with certain Pinyin sounds because it’s simply too counterintuitive given the sound of letters in English.
  Example: The aforementioned “shi” would be more intuitively written as “shrr” because that “i” actually sounds like an “r” when you speak it. Many students initially read this like the English “she” because the idea of “i” sounding like “r” is super counterintuitive.
  Example: “yan” rhymes with ten, not with fan. Initially Pinyin learners really want to read that “an” like the English word an.
• Improve your tones. Tones are explicit in Zhuyin—You can actually type out the tone to narrow your character search. This means that simply by typing in Zhuyin often you can reenforce the tone of each character.

Also, Zhuyin just looks great. How much more interesting is this keyboard than the standard US keyboard?

Why not learn Zhuyin?

• You’re not going to be in Taiwan for long. As far as I know Zhuyin is only used in Taiwan, so if you’re not going to be here for an extended period of time maybe it’s not worth it. Although all the reasons it’s a good idea still apply.
• No Zhuyin keyboard for simplified Chinese. At least on iOS there’s no Zhuyin input method for simplified Chinese. This is understandable, since Pinyin is used in China, but it still sort of sucks because Zhuyin is arguably faster for typing Chinese (if you’re good at it).
• You just don’t care. Three days is still a non-trivial amount of time, so if learning a new phonetic system really sounds like a chore to you then don’t bother. Despite some drawbacks mentioned above Pinyin definitely works.

How to learn Zhuyin

Want to give it a try? Ready for actionable advice? Here’s the study plan:

• Study this Zhuyin course on Memrise (it’s all free).
  It takes about 3 days to study through this course and get to the point where you’re just reviewing.
• Study with pen, paper and voice. Whenever a new character is presented write it out with your hand and say the sound aloud. This is meant to hook into as many locations in memory as possible.
• Immediately start constructing Chinese characters using Zhuyin. This is of course the end goal of learning Zhuyin, so start almost immediately. Just learned ㄅ? How would you using that to write 吧? Learned ㄅ and ㄌ? How would you write 本來?

That’s all. Do that during your free time for 3 days and you will have completed the Memrise course and be familiar with every Zhuyin glyph.

By day 3 you should be using Zhuyin to actually write full sentences. It will be a slow, tedious process but you will know everything you need to know to create any Chinese character using Zhuyin.

Bonus: In Pleco settings you can enable an option to “Show Zhuyin too” so that whenever you look up something you will see how it is represented in Zhuyin. This is particularly useful for sounds that are unintuitive in Zhuyin like 用 or 因.

Caveats

It takes time to get good. The title of this article is no bluff—You really can learn all the Zhuyin characters in just 3 days. However, to actually be able to read and write Zhuyin quickly takes time. The first 3 days is crucial to get past the hump of having know idea what these opaque symbols mean. After that it’s just a matter of practice and repetition. I still use Pinyin to type things out if I’m in a hurry, because typing Zhuyin takes a really long time.

It depends on your Chinese level. This methodology will clearly not work for everyone, especially if you’re just starting to learn Chinese. My success at quickly learning Zhuyin is due in no small part to the fact that I’ve been using Pinyin for years and already know quite a few actual Chinese characters.

So as with any online advice, YMMV.