Pinyin is the system that China uses to express in written form the sounds of Chinese. (Although many Chinese characters contain a sound element, they are neither universal nor consistent.) Pinyin has a number of important uses. It is useful as a learning tool, for example when learning a new character and the accompanying pronunciation, it can be helpful to note down the pinyin in order to remember how to pronounce it. Pinyin is also used as one method of looking up words in a dictionary.
Also note that Pinyin has been accepted by the Library of Congress, The American Library Association, and most international institutions as the transcription system for Mandarin. In 1979 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted Pinyin as the standard romanization system for Modern Chinese (Mandarin). (There are other systems – Yale, Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Bo Po Mo Fo – but they are not widely used anymore.)
Finally, Pinyin is commonly used to enter Chinese into word processing software or other software on a computer or other similar electronic device. Although Pinyin is not the only way to do this, it is one of the easiest and least complicated. Even Chinese people use pinyin to enter Chinese in to computers and smartphones.
Fortunately for speakers of (standard American) English, many of the sounds found in Mandarin are similar to those in English, with a few important exceptions. There is a built-in danger here that English speakers will look at Pinyin and assume that the pronunciation is automatically the same as in English, so please take special note when it is not.
A final note of interest. Many people, including Chinese, have wondered why they retain characters at all, given the challenge and time involved in learning them, and there was a movement early in the 20th century to eliminate them and use pinyin instead. The following story was written by Y.R. Chao, who also developed Gwoyeu Romatzyh, to demonstrate why characters are essential. There are over 70 characters that are pronounced 'shi' in Mandarin today. Every character in the following story is pronounced 'shi.'
shi2 shi4 shi1 shi4 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi1. shi4 shi2 shi2 shi1. shi4 shi2 shi2 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi1 shi2 shi2. shi4 shi2 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi2. shi4 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi2 shi1. shi4 shi3 shi4 shi3 shi4 shi2 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi1shi1. shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi1. shi4 shi3 shi4 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi4. shi4 shi3 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi1 shi1 shi2 shi2. shi3 shi4 shi3 shi2 shi1 shi1 shi2 shi2 shi2 shi1 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi4
A poet by the name of Shih Shih living in a stone den was fond of lions. As he had taken an oath to eat ten lions, he went out to the market every day at ten o'clock in order to look for lions. It was at the time when all of a sudden ten lions came to the market and also Shih Shih went to the market at once realizing these ten lions. Relying on his (bow and) arrows, he caused these ten lions to pass away. Shih picked up the corpses of these ten lions, and as he went to the stone den, the stone chamber was damp. Shih had the stone den wiped by his servant. As the stone den was cleaned, it was the time that Shih began trying to eat the meal of these ten lions' corpses and he began to realize that these ten dead lions in fact were ten stone lions' corpses and he tried to get rid of this matter.
taken from http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/SHISHI.RXML
As you can see, while the story is quite intelligible when written in Chinese characters, using some 30 different characters, in Pinyin it is gibberish, the meaning of which no one could even guess. This, of course, is an extreme example meant to make a point. Others argue that if we can understand people speak - when all we hear are sounds - then we could similarly understand what is written. The difference, of course, is context, as language is all about context. Others have suggested combining radicals - the meaning elements of characters - and pinyin for pronunciation.
Bullet Point Summary
Pinyin is the system used to write the sonds of Chinese characters using the English slphabet.
It is a learning tool; it is used to look up characters in a dictionary; it is used by most organizations to transcribe Chinese names, places, etc; and it is used to input Chinese on computers and similar electronic devices.
back to the Pinyin Menu
OR
on to Pinyin