Chinese language for dummies: 3. Pinyin ( A blog to memorize Zhou Youguang)

First let me introduce a great man in Chinese history, the father of Pinyin – Zhou Youguang 周有光 (13 January 1906 – 14 January 2017).

He passed away yesterday quietly at his home in Beijing, China, one day after his 111 year birthday. The pinyin system became ISO 7098 after a vote, his effort to develop it made great contribution to the Chinese literacy(before Pinyin was developed, 85% of Chinese people could not read, now almost all can.), is also one step forward to bridge China and the globe, especially in information age.

What is Pinyin?

Have you wondered about how do we type Chinese characters from a keyboard on the computer or mobile phone where there are only alphabetical letters? Have you ever wondered how we Chinese able to pronounce all those complicated characters? Why a Chinese person has a name with English letters on his or her international passport?

The answer lies in Pinyin.

Pinyin – 拼音 is a Chinese word, it literally means “to pronounce with letters”, it was introduced in 1955 when the Chinese Communist government took the initiative to reform the Chinese language in mainland China in order to increase literacy. This initiative also includes: reducing the amount of strokes in individual characters, reducing the total number of characters, standardizing and simplifying Chinese characters, and romanizing the pronunciation of the Chinese language.

Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is normally written using Chinese characters. (Wikipedia)

Every Chinese character has a Pinyin corresponding to it as a guide for pronunciation, every individual pinyin includes the Romanian letters to pronounce and 4 diacritics denoting tones. It takes some practice the pronounce the 4 tones correctly. When we started to learn Chinese, the book always shows the Chinese characters and the pinyin on top of them:

After a few years, only the pinyin of the new characters are shown in the books:

Correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). In fact tones are as important as vowels in Standard Chinese.

Now that you know a bit more about Pinyin, to practice the pronunciation and the tone, you can this page.

How to type pinyin from a phone or computer?
If you know how to pronounce the word, in the keyboard you simply type the pinyin of the word or words, then through the software, there will be characters or expressions proposed so that you can select.