Pinyin 漢語拼音 (汉语拼音)

Hànyǔ Pīnyīn · from Chinese

What is Pinyin?

Pinyin is the official romanisation of Standard Mandarin, writing pronunciation with Latin letters and tone marks.

Hanyu Pinyin was adopted in the PRC in 1958 and became the ISO standard in 1982. It is the default way learners and phone keyboards input Chinese. Its spellings do not match English sounds: q is like ch, x like a soft sh and c like ts.

Examples

mā, má, mǎ, mà; 北京 Běijīng; 綠 lǜ (green); 謝謝 xièxie (thank you)

Kungfucius says: Pinyin is not English. Say Xi like she and q like ch and you are halfway there.