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 ...

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 ...

Zhou Youguang, known as the father of Pinyin for creating the system of Romanised Chinese writing that has become the international standard since its introduction some 60 years ago, has died, aged ...

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 ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

Zhou Youguang should be a Chinese hero after making what some call the world's most important linguistic innovation: He invented Pinyin, a system of romanizing Chinese characters using the Western ...

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 ...

I was typing an email this morning and somehow the Microsoft Pinyin IME language tool was enabled on my laptop. I read online and there are some recent posts about this happening to others, but no ...

Today’s Google doodle pays homage to the Chinese linguist Zhou Youguang on what would have been his 112th birthday. Youguang helped create the Chinese phonetic alphabet called Pinyin. He spent three ...

Ever since I lived in Taiwan as a child, I've wanted to learn Mandarin. I was supposed to do that at university but decided on Hindi. Then I was supposed to move to the Chinese mainland after Japan ...

Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world, estimated to be spoken by more than 1.2 billion people in countries like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia. With so many ...