Annotator's Preface to the Pinyin Book of Mormon

This Annotated Study Guide for the Chinese Book of Mormon seeks to overcome one of the biggest difficulties facing Chinese-speaking missionaries: the inability to read the Book of Mormon in Chinese. With this guide, missionaries can read the Book of Mormon on their own, with their investigators, and at loud in church meetings. In order to control the size and expense of the project, currently only selected chapters of the Book of Mormon are included, but these should cover most mission-related activities. Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwan is used as the standard for annotation, though some mainland variants are likely included. Spacing is added to help readers identify word boundaries in the text and make dictionary look up easier.

The source text for the Chinese Book of Mormon comes from the Damshui Branch web site at http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/5165/. Numerous typos were corrected from this version but some likely still exist. The annotation was done automatically with a computer program designed for this purpose. While the annotated pages were proofread afterwards, errors in the pinyin may still occur. Also, certain common tonal changes are not consistently reflected, such as the change in two consecutive third tones, the changes to yi1 (¤@) when followed by different tones, and the change of bu4 (¤£) to a second tone when followed by a fourth tone. This annotated study guide is not meant as a definitive reference, and readers should double-check annotations with a good dictionary if in doubt.

With this tool, I hope that Chinese speaking missionaries will be even more effective in studying the Gospel of Jesus Christ and communicating it to others in Chinese, as well as studying the Chinese language. The Book of Mormon is a marvelous missionary tool and a wonderful companion.

Any mistakes in the text and pinyin annotation are my own. Readers are encouraged to report any errors that are found so that they can be fixed in future editions.

Erik Peterson
August, 2000
lds@chinesetools.com