Hanyu Pinyin - How Chinese Can Be Readable to Anyone Who Can Read English

If you are thinking of learning Chinese, the need to learn Chinese characters may scare you. If you are serious about learning the language, you should probably learn Chinese characters at some point, but there is a way to get you started with the 26 letters of the same alphabet used for English. How does it work?

You have probably heard that there are thousands of Chinese characters. Still, not each Chinese word is expressed with a single character. It is more accurate to say that each character stands for what would be a syllable in English. Like in English, there are many one syllable words in Chinese, which are expressed by one character, but there are also more complex words that are written with multiple characters.

Each character (or syllable) has a transcription in the "English" alphabet. For example:

"good" --> hao

This transcription ("hao") can be referred to as the Hanyu Pinyin version of the character for "good".

Sounds simple, doesn't it? It is not that difficult, but there are a few points you need to be aware of.

Point 1: Chinese Character to Hanyu Pinyin

In well over 90% of the characters, there is a single correct Hanyu Pinyin transcription that expresses the character's pronunciation. But there are a few exceptions. These exceptions are characters (syllables) that have a different pronunciation depending on what word they are part of. For example:

One particular character needs to be transcribed as "hang" when it means "line of business" and as "xing" when it is part of the Chinese word for "travel".

Point 2: Hanyu Pinyin to Chinese Character

For any single hanyu pinyin transcription, there can be tens of matching characters, depending on the meaning. So there is no quick way to write hanyu pinyin and somehow convert it automatically to Chinese characters. You will need to know how to write the characters. For example:

"shi" has at least 75 possible characters, some of them more commonly used than others.

Point 3: Pronunciation of each letter

Even though the letters used by Hanyu Pinyin script are the same that are used for English, that does not mean each letter is always associated with the same sound coming out of your mouth. Good Chinese courses will teach you the accurate pronunciation of Hanyu Pinyin in the very beginning, so that you have a good foundation for learning Chinese pronunciation. For example:

"x" --> is pronounced as a tone in between "ch" and "sh" in English

The good news is that pronunciation of hanyu pinyin is very consistent. Much more consistent than the written form of any other language. So once you know the pronunciation rules, you can apply them in 100% of the cases.

Point 4: Tones

The last thing to pay attention to is that the letter combination does not tell you everything about pronunciation in Chinese. A syllable can be pronounced in high pitch (1st tone), rising pitch (2nd tone), falling pitch which rises towards the end (3rd tone) and falling pitch (4th tone). Each of these different tones will give a completely different meaning to a word. Hearing the pitch and producing the right pitch doesn't not come natural - but everyone can learn it with enough exercise. For example:

ma (1st tone) --> mother

ma (3rd tone) --> horse

Does this sound doable enough for you? Then get started learning Chinese. If you live in Singapore, get started here with finding a good Chinese language course.

The Yago blog provides more in-depth information about Hanyu Pinyin