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 ...

In this short lesson, I walk you through the main Chinese Pinyin finals using simple flashcards and clear pronunciation. I say each final slowly, then a bit faster, so you can repeat after me and feel ...

In academic research, identifying authorship is a unique challenge for Chinese researchers when their names are presented solely in pinyin and might be shared by other researchers whose names are ...

Have you ever wondered why it’s Peking Duck from the city of Beijing? Turns out, it’s all due to the work of a Chinese linguist named Zhou Youguang, who is being celebrated on Google’s homepage on ...

Zhou Youguang, the inventor of a system to convert Chinese characters into words with the Roman alphabet, died Saturday at the age of 111. Since his system was introduced nearly six decades ago, few ...

The phonetic alphabet developed by Zhou Youguang, pinyin, turns 50 this month, having helped up to a billion Chinese citizens to learn to read, write and in many cases speak the national language. The ...