About Pinyin - Mandarin Chinese I

With no built-in guide to the pronunciation of Chinese characters, various systems of romanization – representing the sounds of Chinese using the Roman alphabet – have been developed.

The Chinese developed Hanyu Pinyin in the late 1950s; it was officially adopted in Mainland China in 1979; and it was accepted as an international standard for Romanizing Chinese (ISO-7098: 1991). It has become the most widely accepted standard for the romanization of Mandarin. 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 which letters represent which sounds in Pinyin if one is to be able to use Pinyin as a tool to aid in pronouncing Mandarin accurately. Multi-syllabic words (most words in Chinese) are written in Pinyin as a single word, without spaces.

Overall, Pinyin has been successfully adopted as a system for representing Mandarin Chinese pronunciation and as a system for romanizing Chinese names. Pinyin is also widely used for entering characters into a computer simply by typing in the Pinyin and then selecting the character from a list provided.

In this chapter, you should increase your understanding of Pinyin and the structure of Chinese syllables and simple finals.