Overview
Pinyin, short for Hanyu Pinyin (Chinese phonetic alphabet), is the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hanyu means the Chinese language, and Pinyin means "spell sound", or the spelling of the sound.
Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by the government in the People´s Republic of China. It superseded older romanization systems such as Wade-Giles (1859; modified 1912) and Postal System Pinyin, and replaced zhuyin as the method of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China. In 1982, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted Pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese (ISO-7098:1991).
Pinyin Syllable Structure
A syllable in the Modern Chinese is composed of an initial, a final and a tone mark. The initial is a consonant that begins a syllable, which cannot exist by itself, and the final is the part that follows it, most of which can also stand by itself. There are altogether 23 initials and 24 finals in the modern Chinese. Syllables of the modern Chinese common speech have four basic tones plus a neutral tone to distinguish their meanings.
For example, in "pā", "p" is the initial, "a" is the final, and the syllable is in the first tone. Some are known as zero initial syllables, which contain no initials but only finals, such as "àn".
Function
Pinyin is a way to represent Chinese characters and express the sounds in the Chinese language using the alphabet. There are other systems to express Mandarin, but Pinyin is the most accepted and widely used. Once you learn Pinyin you will know how to pronounce any word in Mandarin using a Chinese dictionary. Pinyin is also the most common way to input Chinese characters into a computer.
Chinese Pinyin is only a system to label the pronunciation of the Chinese character(s), so it cannot replace Chinese characters for the time being. Articles written completely in Pinyin are difficult to comprehend. Therefore, it is not an official writing style, but a reading aid.
