You can also quickly learn the meaning of new words that you hear by looking them up in Chinese-English dictionary, as most dictionaries are organized according to Pinyin. You can look up words in an English-Chinese dictionary and know how to pronounce the Chinese translation. With Pinyin you will be able to pronounce the names of Chinese people and places in China mentioned in news articles. Explore the map below to see the Pinyin for various Chinese cities. You can even see pinyin on Google maps of China. Hanyu Pinyin is also used for place names on Chinese maps. Street signs in China, for example, often include Pinyin to help you pronounce street names correctly. But unlike those systems, Pinyin is widely used in China itself. As it was not developed for foreigners, Pinyin has a few quirks that make it more challenging than some other romanization systems.
Its primary purpose was to teach standard pronunciation within China and to promote literacy by giving Chinese students a way to look up the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters in a dictionary. Unlike other romanization systems, however, Pinyin was not invented for teaching the Chinese language to foreigners. Pinyin (also known as Hanyu Pinyin) is a romanization system developed in the early 1950s by Chinese scholars on the basis of earlier work in the 1930s and 1940s. The table below shows five Chinese words in different Romanization systems: Listen to the Chinese audio in the left column and then look at how the various romanization systems render the words in Latin letters. A selection of these systems are included in the table below. This romanization system allowed speakers of Portuguese to sound out Chinese characters in an alphabet that was intelligible to them.ĭuring the past hundred years or so, both western and Chinese scholars have invented many systems for romanizing Chinese. The Jesuit scholar Matteo Ricci, for example, developed a system of romanization for Chinese during the sixteenth century, and used it to create a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary. Western scholars visiting China started experimenting early on with romanization, that is with a system for conveying Chinese sounds through the Latin alphabet that English and most European languages use. Chinese is written in characters, so there is no easy way for learners to figure out how to pronounce a character just by looking at it. We then learn how to use letters to spell words and then learn a few spelling rules (and the exceptions to those rules).
You may take it for granted that letters represent sounds and can be used to form words that can be “sounded out.” In elementary school, we learn the 26 letters of the alphabet and practice associating those letters with specific sounds.
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