Pinyin: Everything you need to know

By Felipe / Last updated October 26, 2024

Have you ever wondered how Chinese people type all those fancy characters on a standard keyboard? And how do newspapers know how to write Chinese names using the Latin alphabet? And how do you even get started learning Chinese with all those squiggly characters? One answer to these questions is: Pinyin! Let's see what it is, how it came to be, and why you should care!

What is pinyin?

Pinyin is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese. It was developed in the 1950s and uses the Latin alphabet to represent Chinese sounds. The Latin alphabet contains the characters you are seeing right now and romanization refers to using these characters to write languages that originally use a different script.

To correctly represent Chinese pronunciation, Pinyin also includes information about tones. They are represented by diacritical marks above vowels, for example, ā, á, ǎ, à.

Pinyin makes learning Mandarin more accessible because it shows how to pronounce Chinese using a smaller set of letters. It is also a great starting point before diving into Chinese characters. Chinese children learn pinyin in elementary school and Chinese children's books have pinyin accompanying the Chinese characters. So if one doesn't know a certain character, there is always the pinyin as a fallback. It furthermore lets you start speaking Chinese right away, if you already speak a language that uses the Latin alphabet.

Lastly, pinyin can be used to input Chinese characters on a computer or smartphone. You simply type the pinyin on a regular English keyboard and the software converts it to Chinese characters for you. However, Chinese contains a lot of homophones (words that sound the same), so the software will give you a set of characters that match the pinyin you typed and then lets you pick one.

Why was pinyin invented?

Chinese characters are great at representing meaning, but they only contain limited information about their pronunciation. That makes them very versatile and enables their use for multiple Chinese languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hokkien. However, this peculiarity has also led to a twofold struggle.

For one, when native speakers don't know how to pronounce a character, they can only represent its pronunciation with a different character with the same pronunciation. Standardizing a language's pronunciation also becomes hard. But at least native speakers already speak the language and likely know most of the words they are reading.

That is unfortunately not the case for us non-native speakers. Learning a language as an adult without being able to rely on some written form of describing how to pronounce words is really hard. That's why foreigners started introducing different romanization systems for Chinese starting as early as the 16th century.

Before pinyin was introduced, there were several systems used to transcribe Chinese sounds. The two most notable ones, representing the two use cases above, are:

• Zhuyin (Bopomofo): Zhuyin was created in China in the early 20th century and uses unique symbols, like ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, and ㄈ to represent sounds. It uses tone markers, ˉ ˊ ˇ ˋ ˙, to denote tones. It became the official phonetic script for Mandarin Chinese in 1928.

• Wade-Giles: This romanization system was developed in the mid-19th century by Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles and was widely used in the West.

When was pinyin invented?

Ready for an interesting fact? After the communist revolution in 1949, Mao Zedong wanted to completely get rid of Chinese characters and replace them with a writing system based on the Latin alphabet. He thought that the Chinese writing system was to complicated and a hindrance to the country's progress. Do you want to take a guess who saved Chinese characters? It was Stalin. He told Mao that China should keep its script. (Source)

Pinyin was then introduced as part of a series of language reforms in China. The primary goals were to improve literacy rates and modernize the nation. Another reform during this time was the introduction of simplified characters. Pinyin was developed by a group of Chinese linguists and was officially adopted by the Chinese government in 1958. It was later endorsed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1982 as the international standard for romanizing Chinese. Taiwan officially adopted pinyin in 2009, but just like simplified characters and the national flag, it is a topic of contention.

How does pinyin work?

All pinyin syllables start with a so-called initial and end with a final. The following pinyin chart shows you all the combinations that are used in modern Mandarin. The first row contains all the initials and the first column shows all the finals.

Closing thoughts

Pinyin is the first romanization system for Chinese that is used by both native speakers and foreign language learners alike. It's not perfect, but it's decent at what it's trying to do. Pinyin is amazing because it detaches speaking the language from reading the language. I think even fewer people would learn Chinese if that was not the case.

One thing to keep in mind is that pinyin simply uses Latin characters to represent Chinese sounds. This does not mean that you can read pinyin like it is English and then magically sound Chinese. It took me a while to fully embrace this, but it did unblock my learning progress. Pinyin is fast to learn and it then stays consistent and doesn't do the things English does, like having "although", "through", and "cough" have completely different pronunciations.

In general, pinyin is an essential tool for anyone learning Mandarin Chinese. It bridges the gap between unfamiliar Chinese characters and the sounds they represent. It might not be perfect, but it's a great ally in your Chinese learning journey, making pronunciation and speaking a lot less intimidating.

Until next time, happy learning! 🔥

Featured image by Thomas Delacrétaz on Unsplash.