Burt: Correct! Mandarin characters don't give us the sound of a word, so the Chinese invented pinyin to help their learners. They took the letters of the Roman alphabet, the same we use for ...

“Since Hanyu Pinyin uses the same 26 letters as the English alphabet, it is much easier to memorise them.” For most non-native speakers and bilingual Hongkongers, the benefits are obvious ...

Taught in elementary schools throughout China, Pinyin acts as a kind of linguistic crutch, enabling students to learn the sounds of words through its 25-letter, four-diacritical-mark system before ...