pinyin
Mandarin spelling system
Pinyin is the standard system for writing Mandarin Chinese using the Roman alphabet.
Developed in China in the 1950s, it represents Chinese sounds with familiar letters plus tone marks: Beijing, Mao Zedong.
Pinyin helps learners pronounce Chinese and enables typing Chinese characters on standard keyboards. (Capitalized Pinyin is the same system, written as a proper noun.)
Cross-script phonetic spelling
- LatinizationAdapting to Roman standards
- spellingCorrect letter sequence
- conversionAct of changing states
- alphabetLanguage's letter system
Latin script · umlauts · apostrophes · syllables · initials · finals · standardization
Distinct sound qualities
- initialName's opening letter
- finalLast and decisive
- syllableUnit of pronunciation
- vowelUnobstructed speech sound
consonant · aspiration · diphthong · monophthong · phoneme · articulation · voicing · nasal
Marks altering letter pronunciation
- acute accentDiacritic showing stress
- grave accentLeftward-sloping vowel marker
- spacingInterval arrangement between objects
- capitalizationUsing big letters properly
hyphenation · apostrophe · typography · fonts · display · encoding
Array of input keys
- typingEntering text via keyboard
- predictive textAlgorithm suggesting likely words
- autocompleteSoftware-suggested text completion
- voice recognitionTechnology identifying spoken language
transliteration
Cross-script phonetic spelling
- LatinizationAdapting to Roman standards
- spellingCorrect letter sequence
- conversionAct of changing states
alphabet · Latin script · umlauts · apostrophes · syllables · initials · finals · standardization
tones
Distinct sound qualities
vowel · consonant · aspiration · diphthong · monophthong · phoneme · articulation · voicing · nasal · palatal
diacritics
Marks altering letter pronunciation
- acute accentDiacritic showing stress
- grave accentLeftward-sloping vowel marker
- spacingInterval arrangement between objects
capitalization · hyphenation · apostrophe · typography · fonts · display · encoding
keyboard
Array of input keys
- typingEntering text via keyboard
- predictive textAlgorithm suggesting likely words
- autocompleteSoftware-suggested text completion
- translationtranslator, literal translation, literary translation, free translation, French translation
- Chinese charactersradical, hanzi, radicals, pictographs, ideographs
- ChinaBeijing, Shanghai, Great Wall, Yellow River, Chinese calligraphy
- Chinese loanwordsdim sum, kung fu, feng shui, tai chi, yin yang
- Mandarintones, Hanzi, traditional characters, neutral tone, classifiers
- Chinese dictionariesdictionaries, Chinese-English, English-Chinese, entries, definitions
pinyinChinese characters
Logographic writing system
hanzi · kanji · ideographs · traditional characters · simplified characters
pin, pins, pinhead, safety pin, pinning, pined, harping, pinhole, transcription