The phonetic alphabet developed by Zhou Youguang, pinyin, turns 50 this month, having helped up to a billion Chinese citizens to learn to read, write and in many cases speak the national language. The ...

FEW people live to 111. Fewer still leave as big a mark on linguistic lives as Zhou Youguang, who died on January 14th. Mr Zhou was the chief architect of pinyin, the system that the Chinese use to ...

The father of hanyu pinyin, Mr Zhou Youguang, turned 109 on Tuesday. The linguist and dissident came up with the system of transliterating Chinese characters into roman letters in the 1950s. The ...

Mandarin characters don’t tell you how to pronounce a word. They are more like pictures that represent an object or an idea. Burt: Correct! Mandarin characters don't give us the sound of a word, so ...

Zhou Youguang, a onetime Wall Street banker from China who developed Pinyin, a Romanized writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn Mandarin, died Jan.

Ever since I lived in Taiwan as a child, I've wanted to learn Mandarin. I was supposed to do that at university but decided on Hindi. Then I was supposed to move to the Chinese mainland after Japan ...

Zhou Youguang, a onetime Wall Street banker from China who developed Pinyin, a Romanised writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn to read and write ...