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 ...

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 ...

Hong Kong-born pop singer Coco Lee is so fashionable she is inspiring mainland fans to adopt her last name. Technically they already have her name. Millions of people are surnamed Lee, but in the ...

In 1958, a brand new writing system was introduced in China called Pinyin. It used the Roman alphabet to help simplify Chinese characters into words. The mastermind behind Pinyin was a professor ...

Zhou Youguang was born in 1906 during the Qing Dynasty Chinese linguist Zhou Youguang, who created the writing system that turns Chinese characters into words using letters from the Roman alphabet, ...