Pinyin

Pinyin (拼音 pīnyīn, literally “spelled sounds” usually refers to Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音 Hànyǔ Pīnyīn or "Han language Pinyin").

Hanyu Pinyin is the romanization method promulgated and popularized by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for Standard Mandarin, the most widely used dialect of the Chinese language.

There are four main tones in Hanyu Pinyin (yīng, yáng, shǎng, qù), as well as a light or neutral tone. The light tone has no diacritical tone marks. Due to the difficulty in entering the diacritical tone marks in computers, it is common to see the them replaced by numbers in the form yin1, yang2, shang3 and qu4. But nowadays, Google Translate will provide both Chinese characters and Pinyin with proper diacritical marks. Also, ü is often entered as v or uu for the same reason, but can be entered on a number pad as ALT-0252.

Hanyu Pinyin is now universal for PRC. It is also the most widely used method of romanization outside of PRC. For instance, it is used by the Government of Singapore, the United States Library of Congress, and the American Library Association.

Other romanization styles that have the name “pinyin” in them include Tongyong Pinyin? and Postal System Pinyin? (unrelated to the modern day Pinyin).

More information at [ext] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin, [ext] http://pinyin.info/ and the pronounciation can be practised at [ext] http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~pinyin/.

gimpf: Is Wade-Giles anywhere else but in Taiwan of China used anymore?

More information at Wade-Giles and/or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade-Giles

Jono64a: Wade–Giles was invented by scholars of Chinese who were native English speakers. Pinyin was developed by Chinese for Chinese. Both have idiosyncracies, but can reasonably accurately represent Chinese sounds. Native Chinese speakers familiar with both romanizations can often tell which one a native English speaker learned, because of the tendency to relapse into English values of the letters.

TDerz For character search for Go books [ext] http://zhongwen.com/zi.htm could be useful. If you know how to look up radicals, hanzi or Kanji – and you need to know on this site too—then a book could provide a faster result (if at hand). The website provides English-, pinyin-, Cantonese, stroke number-, and character-look-up.

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Pinyin

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