What Is Romanized Chinese?

"Romanized Chinese", "Chinese romanization" and "pinyin" are used almost interchangeably in English, and for modern text that is close enough to true. But there have been at least four Latin-letter systems in serious use, plus one that uses no Latin letters at all, and they disagree about the same sounds in ways that make a single word look like two different words. That is why a search for a Chinese name can return spellings that share barely a letter.

The 5 systems, and where you still meet each one

Zhuyin is on the list because people looking for "Chinese romanization" often mean it, but it is worth being precise: it is a phonetic script, not a romanization, because none of its symbols is a Latin letter. We publish it as a chart of its own at Bopomofo (Zhuyin).

The same syllable in every system

One row per initial that actually differs. Where a cell looks identical across two systems, it is identical — those are the syllables that never caused any trouble.

Wade-Giles to pinyin: the initials that differ

Most of Wade-Giles is close enough to pinyin that you can read past it. The trouble is concentrated in about fifteen consonants, and one piece of punctuation. The apostrophe marks aspiration — the puff of air. So Wade-Giles p is pinyin b, and Wade-Giles p' is pinyin p. Printers and typists dropped the apostrophes constantly, which is how Tao and Dao ended up as two English spellings of one word.

28 names English kept from the old spellings

This is where romanization stops being a technicality. English borrowed Chinese place names, people and words over three centuries and through several systems — Wade-Giles, the postal spellings, Portuguese traders, Cantonese pronunciations and Latin — and then in 1979 switched the news wires to pinyin overnight. Some spellings changed and some did not, which is why Beijing and Peking duck both look right.

Which one should you learn?

Hanyu Pinyin, and only Hanyu Pinyin. It is what every current textbook, dictionary and phone keyboard uses, it is the ISO standard, and it is what this site is built on. The others are worth being able to read — a page of Wade-Giles is unavoidable if you go anywhere near pre-1980 scholarship, and Zhuyin is unavoidable in Taiwan — but there is no reason to learn to write them.

One caution that applies to all of them: romanization is a record of sound, not a translation. Běijīng tells you how to say 北京 and nothing about what it means, and no romanization can disambiguate the homophones that a small syllable inventory forces on Chinese. That is the whole argument for eventually reading characters, and it is why every romanization system ever devised has been a bridge rather than a destination.

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