Learning the Language 201Hanyu Pinyin, often called just Pinyin, is a relatively
straightforward system, but like all forms of Romanisation
has its drawbacks. There are oddities to Pinyin from the
perspective of native English speakers, such as the letter ‘c’
at the start of a word making a sound that to English ears is
closer to ‘ts’. These oddities stem from how many phonemes
(basic building-block sounds) in Chinese simply don’t exist in
English, but are also explained partly when one remembers
that the system was developed by Russians. Pinyin is in some
senses a double-Romanisation, from Chinese characters
to the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, and from there to English
equivalents of Cyrillic letters.
Despite these drawbacks, Hanyu Pinyin is the most
common system today, so we have adopted it throughout
this book; the pronunciation guide and vocabulary guides
below all follow Hanyu Pinyin Romanisation.
A Survival Guide to the Basics
Pronunciation
Again, most expats will become most familiar with the
pronunciation of characters in Mandarin dialect, as expressed
in Pinyin Romanisation. It is worth taking some time to learn
the basic pronunciations and how they are spelled in Pinyin.
Following is a brief guide:
Pinyin Wade-Giles Equivalent English
Phoneme
a a ‘a’ as in ‘mama’bP‘b’ as in ‘bop till you
drop’
C Ts ‘ts’ as in ‘cats’
D T ‘d’ as in ‘radar’EErno English equivalent,
but much like ‘oe’ as in
French ‘oevre’
F F ‘f’ as in ‘father’
G K ‘g’ as in ‘got’