The old aim of replacing Chinese characters with pinyin was abandoned long ago, but in the meantime pinyin has one very important function, that of helping foreigners to pronounce Chinese words. The Chinese names herein have been given both in characters and in pinyin; our pronunciation guide is your first step to making yourself comprehensible. Don't get overly paranoid about your tones: with the help of context, intelligent listeners should be able to work out what you are trying to say. If you're just uttering a single word, however, for example a place name ?without a context ?you need to hit exactly the right tone, otherwise don't be surprised if nobody understands you. For more information, see the Rough Guide phrasebook, Mandarin Chinese.

Occasionally, you will come across systems of rendering Mandarin into Roman letters, which pre-date the pinyin system. The best known of these is the Wade-Giles system, which renders Mao Zedong as Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping as Teng Hsaio-p'ing. These forms are no longer used in mainland China but you may see them in publications which originate in Taiwan.

Chinese Characters

Chinese characters- pictograms built up of components representing simple concepts such as fire, earth, person, wood- must rank as one of the most extraordinary creations of the Chinese people, and they have had a profound effect on the way the language has developed over the past three thousand years. Every character can be pronounced as a single-syllable sound, but the character itself contains no more than hints as to what its pronunciation should be. Fundamentally, the character stands not for a sound, but for a concept. Because Chinese characters are so immutable and so ancient however, the individual concepts behind many of them, as well as their grammatical function, have become misty and diffuse. To take a random example, a single character ju can be a verb meaning "to lift", "to start" or "to choose", an adjective meaning "whole" and a noun meaning "deed". In a very vague way we might perhaps see the underlying meaning of ju, but because of the need for clarity, many of the everyday concepts and objects of modern life are referred to not by single characters but by set combinations of usually two or three characters which, added together, make words. In the case of ju above, the addition of shi (world) creates a word with the precise meaning "throughout the whole world"; the addition of mu (eye) creates a word meaning "look".

The average educated Chinese person knows between five and ten thousand characters (as many as fifty thousand altogether have been recorded, though the majority of these are obsolete), but the learning process is extremely long. Given the difficulty of learning characters, and the negative impact this has had on the general level of literacy, the government of the People's Republic announced, in 1954, that a couple of thousand of the most common characters were to be, quite literally, simplified. This drastic measure was not without controversy. Some argued that by interfering with the precise original structure of the characters, vital clues as to their meaning and pronunciation would be lost, making them harder than ever to learn. In the meantime, the simplified characters were also adopted in Singapore, but Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as the majority of overseas Chinese, continue to use the older, traditional forms. Today, ironically, the traditional forms are also making a comeback on the mainland, where they are now seen as sophisticated and smart.

The average educated Chinese person knows between five and ten thousand characters (as many as fifty thousand altogether have been recorded, though the majority of these are obsolete), but the learning process is extremely long. Given the difficulty of learning characters, and the negative impact this has had on the general level of literacy, the government of the People's Republic announced, in 1954, that a couple of thousand of the most common characters were to be, quite literally, simplified. This drastic measure was not without controversy. Some argued that by interfering with the precise original structure of the characters, vital clues as to their meaning and pronunciation would be lost, making them harder than ever to learn. In the meantime, the simplified characters were also adopted in Singapore, but Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as the majority of overseas Chinese, continue to use the older, traditional forms. Today, ironically, the traditional forms are also making a comeback on the mainland, where they are now seen as sophisticated and smart.