Compare romanizations side by side

Mao Tse-tung → Máo Zédōng: The founding chairman of the People's Republic.

Every one of these systems writes the same 410 sounds. They were designed by different people, for different readers, a century apart — so they agree on the sounds and disagree about which letters to spend on them. Wade-Giles (1867) spent an apostrophe on the difference between an aspirated and an unaspirated consonant; Yale (1943) spelled everything the way an American would guess it; pinyin (1958) gave every sound its own Latin letter and moved the difficulty into rules; Bopomofo (1918) gave every sound its own symbol and uses no Latin at all.

The initials are where they part company. This is the table the romanization guide teaches from:

Auto-detect tries every system and keeps the ones that read the whole text. If more than one does — kung fu is valid Wade-Giles and valid Yale — it picks the pair under which your two texts agree best, and says which it chose above the result. The drop-downs override it.

A missing apostrophe is treated as missing, not as absent. English books dropped Wade-Giles apostrophes constantly, so tai could be pinyin dai or tai, and chu could be four different syllables. The tool keeps every reading on the tile and lets the other side settle it. Where nothing settles it, all of them are shown; it never chooses one for you.

Tones are compared only where both sides write them. Pinyin and Yale mark them over a vowel, Wade-Giles with a raised number (ma³), Bopomofo after the syllable — except the first tone, which Bopomofo leaves unmarked, and the neutral tone, whose dot goes in front. A text with no tone marks is never counted as disagreeing.

It works on sounds, not characters. If you have Chinese characters, get their reading with the Pinyin Annotator first, then paste the pinyin here. Spellings that belong to none of the four systems — the old postal forms such as Peking — are shown as unreadable rather than forced to fit.

Composed from the same syllable chart as the pinyin chart and the Bopomofo converter, so the three pages cannot disagree. Wade-Giles is shown with its full diacritics; English print usually drops the ê and ŭ.

Which system should I learn?

Pinyin, for almost everyone — it is what dictionaries, phone keyboards and mainland signs use. Learn to read Wade-Giles if you work with books printed before about 1980, and Bopomofo if Taiwan is your target.

Why does Taiwan still use Wade-Giles names?

Personal names and many place names there were romanized long before Taiwan adopted Hanyu Pinyin in 2009, and a passport name is not re-spelled because the standard changed. That is why a Taiwanese name in Wade-Giles and the same name in pinyin can both be correct.

What about Tongyong Pinyin?

It is covered in the romanization guide but not compared here: it was Taiwan's official system only from 2002 to 2008 and is close enough to Hanyu Pinyin that most of it reads correctly as pinyin.

• Romanized Chinese Explained — why Peking became Běijīng, and where each system is still met
• Bopomofo (Zhuyin) Chart & Converter — all 37 symbols, and a one-system converter
• Pinyin Spelling Checker — is every syllable you typed a real one?
• Pinyin Syllable Chart — every syllable with audio for every tone
• Pinyin Tone Converter — tone marks (nǐ) ↔ tone numbers (ni3)
• Pinyin Annotator — get the pinyin for Chinese characters first
• How to Pronounce Chinese Names — the letters that do not say what an English speaker expects