“While Chinese writing is traditionally understood as logographic and syllable-based, Hànyǔ Pīnyīn is written using the Latin alphabet, letter by letter.”
If this fact is taken seriously, it opens up many new possibilities and areas for creative expression. For example, by casting a fresh light on tone coloring as a tool for education and language study.
In Mandarin, tones are pitch patterns realized on vowels. The vowel is where the tone truly “lives,” as it sustains the sound long enough for the pitch to rise, fall, dip, or remain level. Consonants, by contrast, are typically too short or voiceless to carry pitch and play little to no role in tone perception.
Since tones are phonetically manifested on vowels, it seems reasonable — in an experimental or pedagogical context — to apply visual tone indicators, such as color, specifically to vowels rather than to entire syllables. This approach emphasizes the part of the syllable that actually conveys tonal information and may enhance learners’ sensitivity to tone production and perception.
I played with these ideas focusing on the pedagogical and perceptual side – how learners can visually and intuitively grasp tones. To show how this might look in practice, I put together three visually distinct examples, using Pleco’s standard tone colors for simplicity:
Style 1: Colored vowels inside soft colored rectangles
Style 2: Colored vowels with a soft glow
Style 3: Vowels inside large, colored rectangles
To my mind, this is clean, intuitively readable, and – dare I say – pedagogically brilliant. Simply by coloring the vowels, we visually encode the essence of tone in a way that’s instantly graspable and clearly highlights the tonal components of each word.
Getting the pronunciation and tones right is one of the primary goals for beginner learners of Mandarin. Coloring – and thereby highlighting – the vowels, which carry the tones, feels almost revolutionary. Here are two arguments in favor of what I call “Pīnyīn Vowel Tone Mapping”, or “Pīnyīn Vowel Tone Coloring” (still looking for a name):
Vowel-centric highlighting
We’re staying faithful to the phonetic reality: tones live on the vowel, and we’re giving that fact a visual identity.
Color-coded tonal categories
With a little bit of practice, vowel colors provide an instant way to relate to tone, helping with tone perception and possibly even improving the ability to remember tones.
To conclude this post, instead of just presenting static example text, I’ve turned this idea into an interactive experience. You can try it out here:
