PinYin

  PinYin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into Latin script in the People`s Republic of China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia. It is often use to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into computers.
  Youguang Zhou, who led a Chinese government committee in developing the system in China in the 1950s, developed the system by basing himself on earlier forms of Romanization. The system was published by the Chinese government in the year of 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted PinYin as the international standard in 1982. Furthermore, the system was adopted as the official standard in Taiwan in 2009, where it is generally referred to as the New Phonetic System.

The picture on the left is the PinYin alphabet, there are 23 consonants, 24 vowels and 16 combination syllables.
People in the beginning level are required to learn PinYin as their basic Chinese language skill.
















This video clip is able to help people imitate the pronunciation of each Chinese PinYin integrating the alphabet mentioned above.