Making Sense of Romanized Mandarin Chinese

by John Fotheringham

There have been many attempts to render Mandarin and other Chinese languages into the Latin alphabet. Some have stuck like well-cooked spaghetti, while others have fallen to the linguistic floor. At best, all of these systems are poor stopgaps for learning the Chinese characters they represent. But in your early days of study, and even later when presented with rare characters, Romanization can be a big help.

There are 3 main Romanization systems used in modern Taiwan: Hanyu Pinyin, Tongyong Pinyin, and Wade-Giles. There are also two lesser used Romanization systems called Mandarin Yale and Gwoyeu Romatzyh. I should also point out the Taiwanese themselves don’t use any of these Romanized system, but instead rely on their own unique phonetic system called BoPoMoFo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) or 注音符號 (ZhùYīn FúHào “Symbols for Annotating Sounds”), in which chunks of Chinese characters are used to represent sounds instead of English letters. More on BoPoMoFo in the next article…

Hanyu Pinyin

漢語拼音 (HànYǔ PīnYīn “Mandarin Phonetic Alphabet”) is the official Mandarin Romanizaiton system of the P.R.C., the U.N. and Taipei City, the standard used in almost all Chinese textbooks, and is what I use on this site and in the companion book.

Instead of thinking of Hanyu Pinyin as “consonants” and “vowels”, it is more accurate to break the system up into “initials” (聲母 ShēngMǔ, sounds that begin syllables) and “finals” (韻母 YùnMǔ, sounds coming at the end of a syllable).

Initials

Finals

Tone Marks

One major advantage of Hanyu Pinyin over the following Romanization systems is its use of tone marks. Without them, it can often be hard to figure out how a given syllable should be pronounced, especially when you don’t also have the Chinese characters to go by.

Hanyu Pinyin uses little diacritic marks above the vowel to represent first, second, third and fourth tones. If there is no mark shown, this means the syllable is takes the fifth or “neutral” tone.

Tongyong Pinyin

通用拼音 (TōngYòng PīnYīn “Common Phonetic Alphabet”) was developed relatively recently, and is the official system used by the R.O.C. government. Despite its official status, however, its use is somewhat limited and you are more likely to encounter Hanyu Pinyin or Wade-Giles in Taiwan.

Much of Tongyong Pinyin lines up with Hanyu Pinyin, but there are a few differences:

Wade-Giles

威妥瑪拼音 (WēiTuǒMǎ PīnYīn “Wade-Giles Phonetic Alphabet”) was developed first in the 1860s by Thomas Francis Wade, a British ambassador. The system was later spiffed up by Herbert Allen Giles in the early 1900s, hence the name Wade-Giles.

威妥瑪拼音 is the oldest—and in my eyes—least intuitive Mandarin Romanizaiton system to date. But before you brush it off, realize that many families, companies, cities and streets still use it to render their names into English.

Here are some differences between Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles to keep in mind:

Gwoyeu Romatzhyh

Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GuóYǔ LuóMǎ Zì 國語羅馬字 “National Language Romanization”) is still touted by some as the best system for native speakers of English. Unlike the systems mentioned above, it uses spelling instead of diacritic marks to indicate changes in tone. As you can see in the chart below, the same syllable is spelled four different ways to indicate first, second, third and forth tone:

Mandarin Yale

Mandarin Yale is one of four Romanization systems created for use by U.S. military personnel in World War II, but has since fallen into obscurity.

Pinyin Politics

As you have seen, Mandarin Romanization is quite cumbersome. But beyond the complexity, this seemingly innocuous issue has even become political in Taiwan. In a nutshell, pro-independence folks (typically DPP) tend to favor TōngYòng PīnYīn (通用拼音) since it was developed in Taiwan. Those with warmer feelings toward the mainland (usually KMT) opt for HànYǔ PīnYīn (漢語拼音), a system developed by and used throughout the PRC.

A quick look around will show you that the political division centers around the boundary between Taipei City and aipei County; with the former utilizing HànYǔ PīnYīn and the latter employing TōngYòng PīnYīn. Since many streets and bus routes cover areas in both the city and county, however, you will often be confronted with bizarre spelling inconsistencies.

Case in point: this bus reader board uses two separate letters to represent the exact same character and sound: