Chinese Pinyin

There are many misconceptions about Chinese language. Often times in my Chinese class, we spent a great deal of time to discuss what Chinese is (as a language). If you don’t know how Chinese language works, it’s quite hard to grasp the idea of Chinese Pinyin.

I would like to start by telling you that Pinyin wasn’t part of the Chinese language until 1958. Well, the Chinese language is over 5 thousand years old, you may be asking… Why there wasn’t such a thing before?!

It’s important to answer this question first, the answer will lead us to a further understanding of this beautiful language.

When you are looking at some Chinese characters, have you ever wondered what the main differences are between English (French, Germany …) and other languages you may speak? Taking English as an example, if I offer you some obscure English words, you will most likely to be able to pronounce it even though you may not know the meaning of the word. This is because the English language is composed of Roman letters. Every letter carries a phonetic cue, put prefix, suffix and some limited roots aside, the combination of the letters offers little clue about the meaning of the word. This is true for most modern languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Portuguese etc…

Now let’s take a look at the Chinese language.

chinese_character_evolution