Learn Chinese Introduction to Pinyin

Hanyu Pinyin is the most widely accepted standard for romanizing Mandarin Chinese. It was developed in the late 1950s, officially adopted in mainland China in 1979, and accepted as an international standard for romanizing Chinese (ISO-7098: 1991). Although the pinyin system uses the Roman alphabet, it has reassigned a few letters to sounds that are quite different from what an English speaker would expect. Therefore, it is extremely important to memorize the pinyin pronunciation if one is to have a reasonably close approximation to the Mandarin sounds that it is representing. While easy to criticize, the reassigned letters are in fact no more confusing than similarly non-standard reassignments that have been made in previous romanization systems (such as Wade-Giles or Yale). The Pinyin choice of letters allows it to dispense with the use apostrophes and reduces the number of two character consonants compared to earlier systems. Another obvious improvement is the way it represents multi-syllabic words as a single word unlike previous systems, which insisted in separating each syllable with a space.

Overall, Pinyin has been successfully adopted as a system for representing Mandarin Chinese pronunciation and as a system for romanizing Chinese names; the latter somewhat less successfully because the tone marks are usually dropped thus creating some unintended homonyms. Pinyin is also widely used for entering characters into a computer.

Next

• Pinyin Rules: Initials, Finals and Tones. All of the pinyin pronunciation rules in one concise page.

See also

• Pinyin Combination Table. The actual number of syllables in use is only about half the number of possible combinations of initials and finals.
• Zhuyin and Pinyin Conversion Table. If you learned Zhuyin, popularly known as Bopomofo, you can quickly learn the Pinyin system using this simple conversion table.
• Mandarin Phonetic Systems Conversion Table. Shows the corresponding representation among the four most popular phonetic schemes used in recent history: Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Yale, and Zhuyin.
• Pinyin Text Editor. Create text with proper tone marks easily without complex keyboard combinations.