Here’s a new book I made for fun: PÄ«nyÄ«n Dòngwùyuán (4.3 MB PDF).
It goes through the letters of the alphabet: A is for Änchun, B is for bÄnmÇŽ, C is for chángjÇnglù, etc., all the way through Z, which is for zhÄngyú.
But X is not for xióngmÄo. I’m sick of pandas. Let’s let some other animals have some time in the spotlight.
Although technically speaking the Pinyin alphabet is the same as that for English, I prefer to go with A–Z, minus V but plus Ãœ.
O and R were the tricky ones to find animals for.
Perhaps some teachers will print this out and hang it up in their classrooms. Or kids could use it as a coloring book. You have my permission to do just about anything you like with this — other than add Chinese characters. (The world already has plenty of material in Hanzi, but not nearly enough in Pinyin.)
I made sure to include multiples of some common morphemes (e.g., bÄnmÇŽ, hÇŽimÇŽ, and mÇŽ; èyú and zhÄngyú; hÇŽimÇŽ and hÇŽi’Åu; niú, wÅniú, and xÄ«niú), which I hope will be useful.
For fonts, I used the Linux Libertine family.
This took me far longer to make than I thought it would, so I hope some people enjoy it or at least find it interesting.
Victor H. Mair said
Real words for real kids!
dl7und said
Nice!
transliterationisms said
You should turn this into an iBook ASAP!
ke said
Wow, this is beautiful! I’m thinking about putting it up above my desk.
Tezuk said
It is fantastic. YÃnghuÇ’chóng is my personal favourite.
Gerrit said
Although I like it as well, I’m wondering about one thing: You live in Taiwan, but how come you only include Mainland pronounciation? I saw this with guÄniú and qì’é. Especially because it is so hard to find Taiwanese pronounciation, even more in Pinyin.
Maybe you could make two versions? :)
Kai Carver said
Really like this. Forwarding to my nieces in Switzerland. Nice job!
Pinyin Info said
@Gerrit: That’s a fair point. I wanted to use a snail; but there are many possible G animals, so there was no pressure to put the snail under that letter. And I thought I should use one of the standard, common animals: GOU. OTOH, there aren’t as many W animals, esp. if WU- is used for the letter U instead. There’s WENZI, which was tempting (lots of opportunities for students to use that word). But I like WONIU better. And, anyway, I didn’t see a good public-domain WENZI image. QI’E, though, is another matter. Maybe I should “fix” the tones on that one.
Nicki said
Love this, thanks for putting it up!
Gummy worm said
Amazing work and a pretty good choice of font