Mandarin characters don’t tell you how to pronounce a word. They are more like pictures that represent an object or an idea. Burt: Correct! Mandarin characters don't give us the sound of a word, so ...

Zhou Youguang, a onetime Wall Street banker from China who developed Pinyin, a Romanized writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn Mandarin, died Jan.

In 1958, a brand new writing system was introduced in China by a professor called Zhou Youguang. It was called Pinyin and it helped to rapidly increase Chinese literacy levels. Show more In 1958, a ...

So begins one of the most beautiful and well-known Tang dynasty poems, Farewell, composed by Wang Wei (AD699-761). To spell out this passage using Hanyu pinyin, mainland China’s official system of ...