What Is Hanyu Pinyin?

If you have ever looked at Chinese characters, you might have thought, do I have to memorize all of those characters? Good news, there is Pinyin. It's basically Mandarin with Latin letters. Although the letters may look familiar, it stubbornly refuses to sound the way you expect. It's a brilliant idea, to make Mandarin easier by using an alphabet, however that alphabet developed a few rules of its own rules.

Almost everyone who writes about Chinese in English just says "pinyin", so the full name looks like jargon. It is not: hanyu says which language and pinyin says what kind of thing it is. Other languages have their own pinyin — there are official romanizations for Tibetan and Uyghur written on the same principle — and Chinese has had several of its own. The long name is what makes it unambiguous, and it is the name written at the top of the 1958 document that created it: 汉语拼音方案, the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet.

The name, taken apart

Every reading and meaning below comes from our own dictionary at the moment the page loads, not from anything typed into this article. Tap a character to hear it.

Put back together: 汉语拼音 is Chinese-language spelled-sound. That is the whole idea. It is a way of writing down how a Chinese word is said, using letters most of the world already knows, and it was designed for exactly two jobs — teaching children to read, and giving foreigners a consistent spelling of Chinese names.

"Hanyu pinyin to Chinese" — which converter do you need?

Four different things get pasted into a Chinese converter and they are not the same job. Pick the one that matches what you are holding — the wrong tool will give you nothing back and look broken.

It is the standard, not one option among several

This is the part that surprises people. Hanyu Pinyin is not a popular convention that caught on — it is a national standard, an international standard, and the first thing a mainland Chinese child is taught to read. Every dictionary, every textbook, every phone keyboard and every passport uses it. When you learn pinyin you are not learning one school's notation; you are learning the one everybody agreed on.

The 1979 line is the one that explains a bookshelf. Anything printed in English before it spells Chinese names in Wade-Giles or the old postal romanization, which is why one city is both Peking and Běijīng, and one man is both Mao Tse-tung and Máo Zédōng. Nothing about the Chinese changed; only the letters did. We take that apart properly in Romanized Chinese Explained, which compares all five systems and decodes 28 of the old spellings.

What pinyin is, and what it is not

The search phrase itself carries the commonest misunderstanding: "hanyu pinyin to Chinese" sounds like translating between two languages, and it is not. Pinyin is Chinese — written down a different way.

The second row is the one worth sitting with, because it is the question people ask most often in a different form: does Chinese have an alphabet? The short answer is no, and pinyin is not the exception — it is written beside the characters, not instead of them. That question has a page of its own: Does Chinese Have an Alphabet?

Where you actually use it

Pinyin is not a beginner's crutch you put down later. Two of these six are things a fluent adult in China does every single day.

Frequently Asked Questions