A Brief Introduction to Chinese Pinyin

Hanyu Pinyin ( 汉语拼音）is a romanization system used for pronouncing Chinese characters using Latin letters. The first recorded attempt of using the Latin letters to denote the sound of Mandarin was made by Mateo Ricci and his fellow Jesuit Nicolas Trigault in the 17th Century<1>. Other more recent romanization systems include the Wade-Giles system, the Yale system, Phonetic Symbols 注音符号， also called BoPoMoFo) and Hanyu Pinyin.

The Hanyu Pinyin system was first adopted by the government of the People's Republic of China in 1958. In 1982, the International Organization for Standardization also adopted Hanyu Pinyin as the standard Romanization system for modern Chinese.


Matteo Ricci : 利玛窦

How to Pronounce Chinese Using Pinyin

In the Pinyin system, the pronounciation of each Chinese character in Mandarin is transliterated into a pinyin syllable, which contains a combination of consonants and vowels using the 26 most common letters in the Latin alphabet. For example, the character 中, meaning "center", is transliterated into "zhong". Since this character is pronounced in the first tone, a horizontal tone mark is also added on top of the vowel "o" to indicated the tone of this syllable "zhōng".

A pinyin syllable for each character, therefore, consists of three elements; a consonant called the "initial", a vowel called the "final", and a tone mark। The tone marks are placed over a vowel (Remember that there are 4 tones in Mandarin... actually there are 5 tones, the fifth being a neutral tone)

han4 yu3 pin1 yin1
汉语拼音

wo3 = I
bu4 = no, do not
ming2bai= understand



<1> Mateo Ricci (1552-1610), an Italian Jesuit and founder of the Jesuit mission to China. In his 1605 publication entitled {西字奇迹｝(The Wonders of the Western Words) he introduced a system denoting Chinese pronunciation using Latin alphabet. This system was further improved by French Jesuit Nicolas Trigault (1577-1629) and was published in 1626 in his {西儒耳目资} (Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati).

Source: Howard, Jiaying and Xu Lanting. HuanYing, An Invitation to Chinese. 1st ed. Boston, MA: Cheng&Tsui 2009.