My mum is working hard to learn how to type Chinese using pinyin. When I’m at home, she asks me things like, “How do you spell cē? What’s the difference between guàn and kuàn?”

When I’m in Shepparton, though, mum has no one to help her — until this week, that is, when she realised she could ask some of the students she helps at school.

When I came home this weekend, mum pounced on me. “Joan, do you know how to type nü in the computer?”

The word nü is Chinese Mandarin for ‘woman’.

I knew the answer to this one. “Um, nü is spelled n and u with the two dots at the top. It’s a special character for the ‘yu’ sound. If you used a normal u, it would sound like nu, as in ‘effort’. The only other word I know that uses ü is lü, as in ‘green’. You can’t type nÇš on the keyboard. You have to type ‘nv’ instead.”

“How did you know that!” mum exclaimed.

“Someone taught me, I guess,” I replied.

“I asked one of my students. He’s a little seven year old and he said, ‘I think you type ‘nv’. Now every time he sees me, he grins and shouts, ‘Did you find it, teacher? Did you find nü in the computer? It was ‘nv’, right?’ Told you so!

“The next day, I asked him how to spell another word.” Mum wrote out the word fÄ“n, which means a ‘part’ or ‘portion’.

“The little boy looked at the word and shook his head. He said, ‘Um. I don’t… I’m not sure… But you can ask him.’ He pointed to one of his fellow classmates. ‘He’ll know! He’s got to Grade 5!’ “

Update 10:47 PM 31 July
For some reason, if you look at the Wikipedia article on pinyin, you can see the ü character with the caron accent (third tone in Chinese). When I copy and paste it into my blog entry, it doesn’t work in most browsers, even browsers where the Wikipedia article displays correctly. Can your browser see this or are they boxes? nÇ” nÇš lÇœ

The words display correctly on my desktop but not this laptop I’m using now or computers at work.