FEW people live to 111. Fewer still leave as big a mark on linguistic lives as Zhou Youguang, who died on January 14th. Mr Zhou was the chief architect of pinyin, the system that the Chinese use to ...

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 ...

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 ...

Today’s Google doodle pays homage to the Chinese linguist Zhou Youguang on what would have been his 112th birthday. Youguang helped create the Chinese phonetic alphabet called Pinyin. He spent three ...

Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world, estimated to be spoken by more than 1.2 billion people in countries like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia. With so many ...