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 ...

In this short lesson I walk you through the first part of the Chinese alphabet, focusing on the initial sounds in pinyin. I ...

The father of hanyu pinyin, Mr Zhou Youguang, turned 109 on Tuesday. The linguist and dissident came up with the system of transliterating Chinese characters into roman letters in the 1950s. The ...

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 ...

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 ...

In 1958, a brand new writing system was introduced in China called Pinyin. It used the Roman alphabet to help simplify Chinese characters into words. The mastermind behind Pinyin was a professor ...

Zhou Youguang, a onetime Wall Street banker from China who developed Pinyin, a Romanised writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn to read and write ...