Use of pinyin

The issues of how to transcribe Chinese, which is normally written in a complex system of thousands of Chinese characters, into the Roman alphabet that English-speakers are familiar with, is a challenge which has been approached in many different ways over the years.

Chinese Pronunciation

The problem of pronunciation is greatly complicated by the fact that the sounds of the Chinese language are almost entirely different from those of the English language.

In this pronunciation guide we make no attempt to give accurate linguistic information.

The student who wishes to learn the Chinese language is welcome to do so, but for the majority it would be foolish, not to say impossible, to attempt to teach in a few moments how to accurately pronounce Chinese language.

Our goal here is to give, in the simplest way, a guide for the casual reader to approximate the correct pronunciation within the limits of the English language’s sound-range.

Follow these guidelines and your pronunciation – although unintelligible to a native speaker – will be as close as is possible for an English-speaker without embarking on intensive language training.

There are in fact numerous different Chinese dialects, and in this website we use “Mandarin’, the standard and official language, which is both the main dialect of Northern China (including the capital Beijing), and is also used as the common language of communication among speakers of all dialects across China.

Pinyin

There have also been many different systems for transcribing Chinese into the Roman alphabet. Throughout the earlier part of the 20th Century most scholars used a system called “Wade-Giles”. Its use has now been almost completely replaced by a system called “Pinyin”, created by the Chinese government. An example of how two different transcription systems may represent a word is in the writing of the name of the capital, “Beijing”, which until recently was commonly written in English using an older system as “Peking”. Much of what the reader will see in books and internet articles still uses “Wade–Giles” and for this reason we give here a guide to switching between the two.

Common examples of different spelling include;
Pinyin – Taijiquan Wade-Giles – T’ai Chi Ch’uan
Pinyin – Zhang Sanfeng Wade-Giles – Chang San Feng
Pinyin – Baduanjin Wade-Giles – Pa Tuan Chin

Note that Pinyin often combines syllables, whereas Wade-Giles always separates all syllables; the reasons for this are unnecessary to go into here, and in fact syllables may be combined differently in varying texts.
In this website, written for the non-Chinese reader, we combine the syllables of individual words, except where we feel it would be confusing for the novice reader.

Vowels:

A as in car
E as in the
I as “ee” in keep
O as in on
U as “oo” in cool
U (with umlaut) as in tune
AI as in Thailand
AO as “ow” in how
EI as “a” in late
IAO as “eeow” in meow
IA IE IU IO IAO as “y” followed by A, E, U, O, AO
OU as “ow” in low
UA UAI UEI UI as “w” followed by A, AI, EI, I

Consonants:

C as “ts” in bits
G always as in go, never as in gentle
Q as “ch” in church
QU as “chw” in patchwork
X as “sh” in show
Z as “ds” in lads
ZH as “s” in casual

The rest should be pronounced as they would be in English.
Some sounds, such as Q and Ch, X and Sh, appear to be the same to the casual reader; in fact they are pronounced differently, but in too subtle a way to be heard by someone who has not made the effort to learn the Chinese language fully.

Each character in written Chinese represents an individual syllable; for this reason Pinyin and Wade-Giles use syllables rather than “sound-by-sound” spelling.

The following resource from the University of Chicago contains a chart that enables the reader to switch from one system to the other by looking up the syllables, which are listed in alphabetical order: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/about/directory/departments/eastasia/find/wade-giles-pinyin-conversion-table/