When someone is learning Chinese, at the very beginning, words are shown just in Pinyin, and later, when one is learning characters, the syllable will be marked above the character to help you to memorize the character. In the end, they found that many sounds of Roman letters are fairly close approximations of Mandarin, with exception of some cases.īased on this idea, rather than letter by letter, one Chinese Hanzi character has a corresponding set of roman letters (which is called Pinyin syllable) to indicate its sound. And so, a group of linguistics created the Hanyu Pinyin system (汉语拼音), choose one set of coding/decoding system to show the real pronunciations of all Chinese characters, so the illiterate Chinese people and foreigners can learn this language more easily. The Chinese government and the educational development wanted to promote this new Chinese alphabet in Mainland China starting from the 1950s, so that also people that know nothing about Chinese characters could still read. Another reason the Chinese alphabet was required was the use of conventional typewriters. Before this so called Chinese alphabet, there were different methods to figure out how a Chinese character is pronounced, but it was too complicated. It was introduced to assist the learning of the Chinese language. The Chinese alphabet is named Pinyin, and is based on Roman letters, but one letter is missing: the v (which is replaced by “ü” instead, which is different from u). It was created in the 1950s in mainland China and is widely adopted internationally since 1982. The system we are using now is called “Hanyu Pinyin”, which consists of Roman letters, therefore, these letters are what people referred to as the Chinese alphabet. However, Chinese people have always been working on different methods to show how the characters are pronounced.

A common question about the ‘Chinese alphabet’ we get from students is: “I heard Chinese is a box-like ‘character language’, does it have an alphabet?”Īnd yes, opposite to the English language, the Chinese language is an ideographic language.

Chinese hanyu pinyin