Pinyin

All children in the PRC learn the Roman alphabet for phonemic pinyin.

A motivation for East Asians to conserve their sinograms is to distinguish many homonyms. In speech, context tells the listener what is the intended meaning. In the PRC, Pinyin documentation, Romanized Mandarin, is available for minorities who cannot read sinograms. Somehow, they make do.

Cantonese Pinyin is the standard Cantonese Pinyin

When learning Chinese, pinyin is very helpful for beginners.

How do I add pinyin to Chinese characters?

How do you add pinyin to Chinese characters?

For quotations using this term, see Citations:pinyin.

The Chinese government began using the new system Jan. 1 in all its foreign language publications, including the English-language service of the New China News Agency. This is an important source for American journalists writing about China. The United Nations and U.S. government agencies have adopted the new spellings called by the Chinese "Pinyin" meaning "phonetic spelling."[…] The old spelling system, named the Wade-Giles system after the two 19th century Britons who developed it, made correct pronunciation unnecessarily difficult. It used apostrophes to distinguish aspirated consonants, such as p'ai pronounced with a "p" sound, from unaspirated, such as pai pronounced with a "b" sound. The new Pinyin system eliminates this distinction, which most newspapers ignored anyway. "Beijing" is much closer to the Chinese pronunciation that "Peking", and Vice Premier "Deng" is better rendering than "Teng." But the new system uses some letters in ways that still confuse English speakers. Thers difficult letters are: "c" which should be prounced in this system like the "ts" in "its"; "q" which should be pronounced like the "ch" in "cheek"; "x" which should be pronounced like the "sh" in "she"; and "zh" which should be pronounced like the "j" in "jump".[…] Reading the alphabetized words still presents problems for the Chinese, however, because the spellings do not distinguish the flur separate tones in the Chinese language that can significantly change meaning. The word "ma" can mean "mother", "horse", or "scold", depending on what tone is used. Under the Pinyin system, two neighboring provinces of northern China are both spelled "Shanxi". In this special case, one of the provinces is now spelled "Shaanzi", to indicate a different tone in the first syllable.

For quotations using this term, see Citations:Pinyin.