From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pinyin
is the
Mandarin
word for "
spelling
", writing
letters
showing the sound of a word in place of a
Chinese character
. Today, it almost always has the sense of
Hanyu Pinyin
, the
way of writing
Mandarin
sounds which has been used by the
People's Republic of China
from the 1950s. Other countries like the
United States
and
Taiwan
used other
ways of spelling Chinese
(such as the
Wade-Giles
and
Tongyong Pinyin
ways) for a long time, but in the late 20th century started to use Hanyu Pinyin as well. It is standard in China and in the
United Nations
. It is the most common romanization system for Chinese.
Pinyin uses
Roman letters
in a special way for certain Chinese sounds. For example, the pinyin letter
C
is pronounced as /ts/ as in the English word "ca
ts
" or the Japanese word "
ts
unami", and does not sound at all like /k/ or /s/ by itself. Pinyin uses
special marks
to show the four
Chinese tones
, which are very important to using Mandarin clearly.
b p m f w
d t n l
g k ng h
j q x y
z c s
a e i o u u
Basic combinations of vowel and consonant
[
change
|
change source
]
ai ei ao ou
an en ang eng ong
There are five kinds of
tone
in Pinyin:
?, a, ?, a, a
Geyin fuhao
is used after the syllables starting with vowels "a, o, e", for example: pi'ao.
We should divide Pinyin text by words and write syllables connectedly, such as "I am a foreigner" should be written as "Wo shi waiguoren" in Pinyin.