Written Chinese

Various styles of Chinese calligraphy.

Written Chinese in it's current traditional form as used on the island nation of the Republic of China (Taiwan) as well as Hong Kong (PRC), was standardized some time between 4000-5000 years ago in China. In contrast, the mainland People's Republic of China (PRC) has chosen to use a simplified version of the Chinese writing system instead of the traditional 5000 year old system. But despite the standardization of the traditional form of the writing system between 4000-5000 years ago, new archaeological discoveries of ancient Chinese characters show that some of these pictorial symbols date as far back as 8000-9000 years ago.^{[citation needed]} This suggests that both the development of writing and Chinese civilisation occurred at a much earlier date than previously established. This pictographic system of writing employs, at the very least, 5,000 commonly used that each represent a morpheme. Combinations of characters produce Chinese words. The writing system is considered to have been a unifying force for much of Chinese history, transcending auditory differences in spoken languages. From the time of the Qin Dynasty onwards, a standard written language (at first Classical Chinese and later Vernacular Chinese) has been in place to bridge gaps between the various forms of spoken Chinese.

Unlike English words, which are composed of letters, written Chinese words are made up of characters. It is popularly believed that Chinese characters represent words; in fact, however, individual characters represent Chinese morphemes and their meanings are generally dependent on context.^{[citation needed]} Most words are composed of two characters, though words are commonly made up of one, three, four or more. This is not unique to Chinese; for instance, the English word "undoable" is made up of three morphemes meaning "not," "do," and "able." In much the same way, Chinese 做不完 (zuòbùwán) "undoable" is composed of three characters or morphemes meaning "do," "not," and "finish."

Context and meaning

As an example of how a Chinese character which does not commonly exist by itself to make a word, but is a part of a multi-syllable word, consider the character 中 (zhōng) which has a basic meaning of "central, middle". A 中心 (zhōngxīn) is a "center" (e.g., a health center). 中美洲 (zhōngměizhōu) is "Central America". 中国 (Zhongguo, literally "middle kingdom") is the Chinese word for "China" and 中 can be used as an abbreviation for "China"; 中文 (zhōngwén) meaning "Chinese language" and 中美 (zhōngměi) meaning (zhongguo-meiguo) "Sino-American" or "Chinese American". When 中 is placed at the end of a subordinate phrase, it can mean "during" or "in the act of," as in 中断 (zhōngduàn) "to interrupt" or 中毒 (zhòngdú) "to be poisoned."

Common Chinese words are particularly flexible. For instance, 可 (kě) on its own has the passive meaning "capable of being," as in 可吃 (kěchī) "edible," but in conjunction with 以 (yǐ) assumes the active meaning "able to," as in 可以走 (kěyǐzǒu) "able to walk."

In many cases, Chinese characters shed their meaning when they are used to transliterate foreign words and names. 布什 (bùshí) is "(George) Bush" and has no association with 布 (bù) "cloth" aside from its phonetic value. Nonetheless, an attempt is often made in these phonetic loans to retain some semantic value, as in 迷你裙 (mínǐqún), "miniskirt," which literally means "fascinate-you-skirt".

A few Chinese characters represent more than one morpheme. This too is not unique to Chinese: English "lead" represents two different morphemes (and words), meaning either "to guide or conduct" or "a particular kind of heavy elemental metal," and being pronounced differently in either case. When a Chinese character--say, 行--represents multiple morphemes, it typically is also pronounced differently depending on its meaning. In this case, the character is pronounced xíng when it means "acceptable" or "to walk," but háng when it means "profession" or "row." However, this need not be the case: the Chinese particle 了 (le) actually represents two morphemes, indicating either change of state or perfection of action, that are pronounced the same way in either case.

Components and the radical

Just as most words are composed of two or more characters, most characters are composed of two or more roots. This is an extra layer of indirection not present in alphabetic languages like English. Historically, as with most languages, the spoken language developed first, and only later did a writing system evolve to denote the spoken language. Chinese characters were considered to have been formed according to one of six basic principles. Two principles governed characters composed of only a single root: the entire character itself. These characters either depicted the object they represented--像形 (xiàngxíng), literally "appearance of shape"--or represented some abstract concept figuratively--指事 (zhǐshì), literally "indication of item." An example of 像形 is 手 (shǒu) "hand," whose original form depicted a stick hand with five fingers; examples of 指事 are 上 (shàng) "up" and 下 (xià) "down."

Two other principles governed methods of combining roots to form compound characters. One--會意 or 会意(huìyì), literally "association of meaning"--signified characters in which the meanings of the component roots were combined to form a compound sense. This is the sense in which English speakers are familiar with compound words; a Chinese example is 好 (hào) "be fond of," which is composed of a woman and child.

However, Chinese was apparently too rich a language for compounds to be derived solely through 會意. Fortunately, the Chinese developed the notion of the rebus. In this conception, a character was composed essentially of two parts. One was a root that indicated the general semantic category of the character. The rest of the character was a phonetic component (very often a fully fledged character on its own) used only for its pronunciation. This principle--called in Chinese 形聲 (xíngshēng), literally "shape sound"--was tremendously productive: By some estimates, about 90 percent of Chinese characters evolved through the principle of 形聲. The exact figure depends somewhat on the particular lexicon being analyzed, but there is certainly no question that most characters are derived in this manner. An example is 清 (qīng) "clear", which is composed of a root meaning "water" and a root (another character, 青) also pronounced qīng.

Two final principles governed how existing characters might assume new meanings. Strictly speaking, these principles do not produce any new characters. One is 轉注 (zhuǎnzhù), literally "transfer into," which covered characters whose original meanings were extended, typically metaphorically, into newer, often more general senses. The last principle was 假借 (jiǎjiè), literally "false borrowing": In these cases, a character with an already established meaning was "borrowed" to cover a second unrelated morpheme for which there existed as yet no written character.

Looking up a word

Because written Chinese is not an alphabetic language, a Chinese dictionary uses other methods of arranging words. Words are grouped into an entry based on its first character. Each character has a part of it designated a primary root, called the "radical." There is an index of 214 distinct radicals, sorted by stroke count, and originally selected so that each character in the Chinese written system would contain at least one radical. And indeed, every written character does contain at least one of the 214 radicals. Some characters contain more than one radical, but even in these cases, one particular radical is designated as the primary radical for that character.

In principle, looking up a character in the dictionary when its sound is not known is a two-step process. First, one identifies the radical for that character eg 好. The radical in this case 女, as in many characters divided left-right, is on the left. This radical can be located in the index of 214 radicals which are arranged by the number of strokes; three in this case. The next step is to look in a second index in which every character is sorted by radical, in this case all characters with the 女 (nü) "woman" radical. There are scores of characters with this radical, so the characters under each radical are sorted according to the number of strokes in the remainder of the character--in this case, 子 (zi) "child," which also has three strokes. Then it is a matter of looking down the list until 好 is located, which will then give its main entry in the dictionary by pinyin or page number.

Beginning in the 20th century, a number of phonetic alphabets were developed for the various Chinese dialects. For the most common dialect, Mandarin, both pīnyīn (used throughout this article) and zhùyīn fúhào are used. Modern dictionaries have the characters arranged by pinyin alphabetical order, or include an appendix in which all the characters are sorted according to one of these phonetic alphabets. This further simplifies the task of looking up a character if the character's pronunciation is already known. For an unknown character, the user must still find the character using the radical method.

In practice, looking up characters is complicated by a variety of considerations. One is that it is not always obvious what the principal radical is. It may occasionally be located on the top, bottom, right, or even inside of another root. Typically, though not always, it is a root that represents the semantic category for the character. Another difficulty is that several common radicals have variant forms, which must be recognized in order to find the proper chapter of the dictionary. Still another problem is that counting strokes is an error-laden process: Some Chinese characters require upwards of 30 strokes to write correctly, and it is not always easy to determine whether part of a character is to be written with two separate strokes or a single angled one. To ease the problem cases somewhat, there is typically an appendix containing a list of characters which are difficult to locate, sorted strictly by stroke count. This still requires the user to count strokes carefully, but eliminates the issue of which root is the radical of the character.

Recognizing that radicals are at least somewhat arbitrary in nature, some lexicographers devised new schemes for Chinese dictionaries. Most of these are poorly represented in print, although the four-corner method, in which characters are organized according to the kind of strokes used in the four corners of the character, has some enthusiastic adherents.

Nevertheless, many dictionaries published in China, Malaysia and Singapore are arranged according to hanyu pinyin, that is in alphabetical order from A to Z (even though the hanyu pinyin does not include the letter 'v'). These dictionaries are mostly used by students studying Chinese.

Written Chinese

The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. It is compounded by the fact that spoken variations evolved for centuries, since at least the late Hàn Dynasty, while written Chinese changed less.

Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese (文言 wényán), which was very different from any spoken variety of Chinese, much as Classical Latin differs from modern Romance languages. Since the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to Vernacular Chinese (白話/白话 báihuà), which, while not completely identical to the grammar and vocabulary of dialects of Mandarin, was based mostly on them. The term standard written Chinese now refers to Vernacular Chinese.

Chinese characters represent morphemes or part of a morpheme independent of phonetic change. For example, although the number "one" is yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and yit in Hokkien (form of Min), they derive from a common ancient Chinese word and can be written with an identical character ("一"). Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialect groups are not completely identical, and their vocabularies have diverged. In addition, while colloquial vocabularies are often different they also share vocabulary that is derived from the Classical written language. Colloquial non-standard written Chinese usually involves "dialectal characters" which are not used in other dialects or characters that are considered archaic in standard written Chinese.

Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and by non-Standard Mandarin speaking Cantonese speakers overseas, with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this variety of Chinese. By contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use standard written Chinese.

Also, in Hunan, some women wrote their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, although the Dungan people live outside China.

Written standards

One can classify Chinese writing into the following basic types:

• Wényán (文言) (Classical Chinese)
• Poems and other Chinese constrained writings

The relationship between the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. This complexity is compounded by the fact that the numerous variations of spoken Chinese have gone through centuries of evolution since at least the late Hàn Dynasty. However, written Chinese has changed much less than the spoken language.

Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in wényán, translated as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, which was very different from any of the spoken varieties of Chinese in much the same way that Classical Latin is different from modern Romance languages. Chinese characters that are closer to the spoken language were used to write informal works such as colloquial novels.

In the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to báihuà , or Vernacular Chinese, which, while not completely identical to the grammar and vocabulary of Standard Mandarin, was based mostly on the dialects of modern spoken Mandarin. The term standard written Chinese now refers to Vernacular Chinese. Although few new works are now written in classical Chinese, it is still taught in middle and high school and forms part of college entrance examinations. Classical Chinese forms are also sometimes included in written works to give them a highly formal or archaic flavor.

The Chinese script also was the base for some other East Asian scripts like the scripts of Khitan and Jurchen, Kanji in Japan, Chữ-nho in Vietnam and Nushu, a script since the 15th century exclusively for Chinese women in Hunan.

Transcending intelligibility of speech

Chinese characters are understood as logosyllabic morphemes that are independent of phonetic change. Thus for example, although the number one is "yī" in Mandarin, "yat" in Cantonese and "tsit" in Hokkien, they derive from a common ancient Chinese word and are written with the same character: 一. Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialects are not identical. The vocabularies used in the different dialects have also diverged. In addition, while literary vocabulary is often shared among all dialects (at least in orthography), colloquial vocabularies vary widely. Colloquially written Chinese usually involves the use of "dialectal characters" which may not be understood in other dialects or characters that are considered archaic in báihuà.

The complex interaction between the Chinese written and spoken languages can be illustrated with Cantonese. In Hong Kong, Cantonese speakers are all taught standard written Chinese in school even though its grammar and vocabulary are based on Mandarin, which is not generally spoken in Hong Kong. As every character in standard written Chinese has a Cantonese pronunciation, standard written Chinese can be read aloud using Cantonese pronunciation but the result is very different from normal spoken Cantonese. For Cantonese speakers in Guangdong Province where nearly everyone can also speak Mandarin, this difference between the written and spoken language is much less pronounced as standard written Chinese can be read aloud in its standard pronunciation, which is Mandarin.

In most written communication, Cantonese speakers, whether they also speak Mandarin or not, will write in standard written Chinese. A literate Chinese typically can read such communication without much difficulty. However, colloquially spoken Cantonese features different grammar and vocabulary, which, if written down, can be largely unreadable by an untrained non-Cantonese speaker. Standard written Chinese essentially functions as a different register for Cantonese speakers who don't speak Mandarin, because they do not write in the way they usually speak. In Hong Kong, standard written Chinese spoken aloud using Cantonese pronunciation (usually with some colloquial words substituted in) serves as an newscasts and other formal contexts.

Written colloquial Cantonese does exist however, and Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a widely used written colloquial standard. This is due in part to the fact that Hong Kong, a large Cantonese speaking territory, was outside of Chinese control for over a hundred years before the British returned it to the People's Republic of China in 1997. In contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in certain tabloids, online chat rooms, and instant messaging. Even so, Cantonese speakers will use standard written Chinese in most formal written communications.

As with other aspects of the Chinese language, the contrast between different written standards is not sharp and there can be a socially accepted continuum between the written standards. For example, in writing an informal love letter, one may use informal báihuà . In writing a newspaper article, the language used is different and begins to include aspects of wényán. In writing a ceremonial document, one would use even more wényán. The language used in the ceremonial document may be completely different from that of the love letter, but there is a socially accepted continuum existing between the two. Pure wényán, however, is rarely used in modern times.

Note: The concept of "language independence" for written Chinese was sharply criticized by John DeFrancis in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy; he claims that the standard written Chinese is strongly tied to the Mandarin spoken language.

Chinese characters (1)

Main articles: Chinese character and Punctuation

The Chinese written language employs the Hàn characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin hànzì), which are named after the Hàn culture to which they are largely attributed. Many Chinese characters appear to have originated as depicting concrete objects. The first examples we have of Chinese characters are Shāng dynasty inscriptions on oracle bones, which are animal bones used in osteomancy (divination using bones). The materials used were, with very few exceptions, the scapulas of oxen (leading to the term scapulimancy), and turtle plastrons (lower shells; thus the term plastromancy). From these shells and bones is derived the modern Chinese term for the earliest Chinese writing: 甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén (lit. "shell-bone-script", see Oracle bone script).

Over the course of the Zhōu and Hàn dynasties, the characters became more and more stylized. Abstract symbols, such as those indicating up and down, combined characters and phonetic loans were already fully developed in even the earliest known oracle bones. For example, 人 rén, meaning "person", originated from a pictogram (象形字 xiàngxíngzì, lit. "like-shape-words") of a man; the concepts "trust", "trustworthiness" etc. are represented by 信, a combination of "man" and "speech/word"; and 九, the pictogram of a hand with the arm bent at the elbow, thus representing zhǒu "elbow", had already been borrowed for jiǔ "nine", which had the same or similar pronunciation. Also, additional components were added so that many characters contain one element that gives (or at least once gave) a fairly good indication of the pronunciation (the "phonetic component"), and another component (the "semantic" component) gives an indication of the general meaning of the character. Such 形聲字 xíngshēngzì, lit. "shape-sound-words" are termed picto-phonetic, phono-semantic, phonetic compounds, etc.. In the modern Chinese languages, the majority of characters are thusly phono-semantically based rather than logographically based. An example would be the character for the word 按 àn that means "to press down". It contains 安 ān (peace), which serves as its phonetic component, and 手 shǒu (hand), that indicates that the action is frequently one that is done using one's hand.

A number of Chinese characters are derived out of each other; as a result some classical dictionaries contain circular references of words having identical radicals and meanings. However, new meanings have been injected into these redundant words through popular usage. Some words were also "borrowed" (ie. additional meanings were attributed thereto) because they bore phonetic resemblance with a concept that had no assigned written character.

Many styles of Chinese calligraphic writing developed over the centuries, such as seal script (篆書, seal-script), cursive script (草書, 草书), clerical script (隸書) and regular script (楷書, 楷书, kǎishū or standard script).

In Japan and Korea, Hàn characters were adopted and integrated into their languages and became Kanji and Hanja respectively, the names being Japanised and Koreanised pronunciations of 漢字. Japan still uses Kanji as an integral part of its writing system, while Korea's use of Hanja has diminished considerably: it was abolished in North Korea in the 1950s, but revived in the 1960s as cultural continuation proved inadequate without Chinese characters; South Korea has entirely deprecated Hanja use outside of obscure academic, medical or other jargon.

In the field of software and communications internationalization, CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and the rarer CJKV for the same plus Vietnamese, all of which are double-byte languages, as they have more than 256 characters in their "alphabet". The computerized processing of Chinese characters involves some special issues both in input and character encoding schemes, as the standard 100+ key keyboards of today's computers do not allow input of that many characters with a single key-press.

The Chinese writing system is mostly logographic, i.e., each character expresses a monosyllabic word part, also known as a morpheme. This is helped by the fact that over 90% of Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic. The majority of modern words, however, are multisyllable and multigraphic. Multisyllabic words have a separate logogram for each syllable. Most Han Chinese characters have forms that were based on their pronunciation plus meaning combined, rather than their meanings alone, and they do not directly express ideas.

Character forms

There are currently two standards for printed Chinese characters. One is the Traditional Chinese characters (繁體字 fántǐzì), used in the Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong (PRC) and Macau (PRC). People's Republic of China (PRC) and Singapore use the Simplified Chinese characters (简体字 jiǎntǐzì) developed by the People's Republic of China (PRC) government in the 1950s and finalised in the 1964 list. Many simplified versions were derived from historically-established, albeit sometimes obscure, simplifications, mostly calligraphic simplifications (through cursive script), others through the replacement of a complex part of a character with a phonetically-similar glyph. In Taiwan, some simplifications are used when characters are handwritten, for the sake of speed and convenience, but in printing traditional characters are the norm. In addition, most Chinese use some personal simplifications.

The simplification process is actually not restricted to the Simplified system. In order to computerize Chinese, the government in the Republic of China (Taiwan) have tried to "standardize" the glyphs of characters being used, in order to eliminate unnecessary variations. As a result, several characters are combined into one, and some characters have their written form altered to ease the glyph generation process by computing technologies at that time. However, these simplification processes are rather minor as compared to those done by the government of the People's Republic of China.

Writing direction

Due to their unique block, square nature and the morphologically inactive nature of the language, Chinese characters are generally written without spaces at word boundaries, and can be written either horizontally or vertically and from right to left or left to right, or from top to bottom or bottom to top. Traditionally, writing was done vertically, going from top to bottom and arranged in columns going from right to left; on signboards etc. which were horizontal, the columns were reduced to a character each, effectively resulting in horizontal right-to-left writing. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, television subtitles still ran from right to left.

After the modernisation efforts of the PRC government in those same decades took a stronger hold there, however, horizontal left-to-right writing à la Latin has become usual practice. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, a parallel process developed with increased exposure to the West, especially the United States, and especially with the advent of technology. Singapore, for its part, has been dually influenced by both its tradition of adopting PRC guidelines with regard to Chinese writing, and by its predominantly Anglophone society. Despite the rise of horizontal writing (which facilitates inclusion of Hindu-Arabic numerals and Roman-lettered acronyms, inter alia), vertical right-to-left writing has persisted in Taiwan and Hong Kong especially in literature, due to the absence of government official policy on adopting horizontal writing.

Chinese characters (2)

Han language (汉语/漢語; pinyin: hàn yǔ), another name for the Chinese language.

The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin: hànzì), which are logograms: each symbol represents a sememe or morpheme (a meaningful unit of language), as well as one syllable; the written language can thus be termed a morphemo-syllabic script.

They are not just pictographs (pictures of their meanings), but are highly stylized and carry much abstract meaning. Only some characters are derived from pictographs. In 100 AD, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, only 4% as pictographs, and 82% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that arguably once indicated the pronunciation.

All modern characters are or are based on the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). There are currently two standards for Chinese characters. One is the traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. The other is the simplified system first introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s and finalized in 1986. The simplified system requires fewer strokes to write certain components and has fewer synonymous characters. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first and only foreign country to recognize and officially adopt the simplified characters.

Calligraphers can write in traditional and simplified characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art.

As with Latin script, a wide variety of typefaces exist for printed Chinese characters, a great number of which are often based on the styles of single calligraphers or schools of calligraphy.

There is no concrete record of the origin of Chinese characters. Legend suggests that Cāng Jié, a bureaucrat of the legendary emperor Huángdì of China about 2600 BC, invented Chinese characters. A few symbols exist on pottery shards from the Neolithic period in China, but whether or not they constitute writing or are ancestral to the Chinese writing system is a topic of much controversy among scholars (see also proto-writing). Archaeological evidence, mainly the oracle bones found in the 19-20th centuries, at present only dates Chinese characters to the Shāng dynasty, specifically to the 14th to 11th centuries BC, although this fully mature script implies an earlier period of development.

The vast majority of oracle bone inscriptions were found in the ruins of Yīn of the late Shāng Dynasty, although a few Zhōu dynasty-related ones were also found. The forms of the characters in the inscriptions changed slightly over the 200 to 300 years, and scholars date the inscriptions of the Shāng to the ruler by the content, particularly from the name of the diviners who inscribed the shell or bone artifacts.

Contemporaneous with the late Shāng and the Western Zhōu periods are a number of bronze inscriptions. Over the last century, a great many ancient bronze artifacts have been unearthed in China which contain dedicational texts of the Zhōu aristocrats where the characters show similarities and innovations compared to the oracle bone inscriptions. In the period between the oracle bones and the bamboo books of the Warring States period, inscriptions on bronzes are the most important record of the written script. Note however that since this spans such a broad period of time, it is hardly meaningful to speak of bronzeware script or bronze script as a single entity.

Romanization

Main article: Romanization of Chinese

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages; this is due to the complex history of interaction between China and the West, and to the Chinese languages' lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries of the 16th century, but may have been written down by Western travelers or missionaries of earlier periods.

At present, the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin 漢語拼音/汉语拼音, also known simply as Pinyin. Pinyin is the official Mandarin romanization system for the People's Republic of China, and the official one used in Singapore (see also Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). It was adopted by the International Standards Organization in 1979, shortly after the United Nations and the normalization of relations between the US and the PRC. Pinyin is now commonly used when teaching Mandarin in schools and universities of North America and Europe. It is also the system which the Library of Congress and American Library Association now use for Chinese materials.

Perhaps the second-most common system of romanization for Mandarin is Wade-Giles. This system was probably the most common system of romanization for Mandarin before Hanyu Pinyin was developed. Wade-Giles is often found in academic use in the U.S., and until recently was widely used in the islandnation of the Republic of China (Taiwan) (Taipei City has opted to use Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the country officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音/通用拼音).

Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison:

Regardless of system, tone transcription is often left out, either due to difficulties of typesetting or propriety for audience. Wade-Giles' extensive use of easily-forgotten apostrophes adds to the confusion. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng, and with Taipei than with T'ai²-pei³.

Regardless of romanization, the words are pronounced the same. Learning a system of romanization requires occasional deviations from the learner's own language, so, for example, Hanyu Pinyin uses ‹q› for very different values than an English speaker would probably be used to; the sound represented is similar to the English ‹ch› but pronounced further forward (an aspirated alveolo-palatal fricative, /tɕʰ/). This is a cause of confusion but is unavoidable, as Mandarin (and any language transcribed) will have phonemes different from those of the learner's own. On the other hand, this can be beneficial, since learners can immediately be made aware of the fact that they will have to learn a new pronunciation. With languages that use similar orthography, the temptation to pronounce words just as in one's mother tongue can lead to great misunderstanding.

There are many other systems of romanization for Mandarin, as well as systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages. See the article category Chinese language romanization.

Other transcriptions

Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The Phagspa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciation of pre-modern forms of Chinese.

Zhuyin (注音; also known as bopomofo) is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools. A comparison table of Zhuyin to Pinyin exists in the Zhuyin article. Syllables based on Pinyin and Zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles:

• Pinyin table
• Zhuyin table

There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Since the Dungan language is usually considered a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, the Dungan alphabet can also be considered a cyrillization of one dialect of the Chinese language, albeit one used in a very specific context.

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