Pinyin Dongwuyuan: an illustrated Pinyin alphabet

Here’s a new book I made for fun: Pīnyīn Dòngwùyuán (4.3 MB PDF).

It goes through the letters of the alphabet: A is for ānchun, B is for bānmǎ, C is for chángjǐnglù, etc., all the way through Z, which is for zhāngyú.

But X is not for xióngmāo. 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 Ü.

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 sell it or 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., bān, hǎi, and ; è and zhāng; hǎimǎ and hǎi’ōu; niú, wōniú, and xīniú), 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.

10 thoughts on “Pinyin Dongwuyuan: an illustrated Pinyin alphabet

  1. 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 gu?niú and qì’é. Especially because it is so hard to find Taiwanese pronounciation, even more in Pinyin.
    Maybe you could make two versions? :)

  2. @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.

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