The pronunciation of Chinese characters has been written with Latin letters since 1956, when the so-called Pinyin System was officially invented. The Chinese word Pinyin means “spelling language”. It is used mainly to teach spoken Chinese. In fact, if a foreigner only wants to learn how to speak Chinese, he really doesn’t need to spend time learning Chinese characters at all; the simple Pinyin System is adequate to help him to master spoken Chinese.

Although Pinyin is already a complete “spelling language” for writing Standard Chinese speech, in China it is not yet regarded as a written language system. Up till now, it has only been used as a tool to learn spoken Chinese and new Chinese characters.

The vowels and consonants of Pinyin

Vowels:

a  o  e  i  u  ü

Consonants:

b  p  m  f  d  t  n  l  g      

k  h  j  q  x  z  c  s  zh        

ch  sh  r

Last modified: Friday, 16 April 2021, 8:03 PM