In general, pronunciation cannot be derived from looking at Chinese characters, although sometimes characters with common parts have similar pronunciation. Unlike other current written languages, Chinese characters are not primarily phonetic, and certainly not alphabetic, but pictographic or ideographic displaying combinations of pictures or symbols to convey meaning like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Hence there has needed to be a way of representing in writing the pronunciation of each character when teaching the language. Several systems have been used, but pinyin is the current standard way of writing Chinese pronunciation.
Before pinyin was developed there were other systems for writing the pronunciation of Chinese words using the English alphabet. The most notable is the Wade-Giles system, settled in However, since the standardization of the Chinese language in the latter half of last century, many of the pronunciations that these old systems represent are no longer valid in China though there are many Wade-Giles names still in common use in Taiwan.
Likewise Canton used to be a way to pronounce Guangdong, a province in the southeast of China. While superseded in China, some of these old pronunciations are still in common use around the world.
Watch more videos about Chinese culture stories. In the tables below is a pronunciation system that is roughly true to standard Chinese pronunciation without tones , but uses the letters of the English alphabet in an intuitive way, instead of assigning new sounds to the alphabet.
