How do you read a Chinese character?

In a previous article, I talked about Chinese characters. In this part, I will tell you about Pinyin, which literally means “phonetic script.”

Imagine how difficult it is for foreigners to learn Chinese if they can see the characters but don’t know how to read them. Or picture this: you’re Chinese and suddenly see a character you haven’t encountered before… covered in cold sweat, you realize you don’t know how to read it, even though it’s your native language!

Did you know that until the 20th century, there was no unified system to transcribe the pronunciation of a character using letters? So, everyone did what they could to survive. I once came across a Soviet-era Chinese dictionary from 1930, where the phonetic pronunciation of characters was written in Russian letters. Thus, each country publishing dictionaries used its own language and method of phonetic transcription.

But since 1958, China has been using a unified transcription system for characters called Pinyin (拼音). At first glance, Pinyin uses the English alphabet. However, the reading rules are not the same as in English. Moreover, we, Russian speakers, are in a more advantageous position than English speakers. The pronunciation of Chinese is much closer to Russian than to English. Almost all Chinese syllables can be written in Russian letters, and the pronunciation will be almost identical to the Chinese. However, English speakers have to struggle to break the stereotype and read “English” letters by Chinese rules.

Americans are known for their simplified systemic approach to many subjects. This has also affected the Chinese language. Some textbooks published in the USA suggest learning only Pinyin and not using characters. But you can only learn the language at a very basic level this way. You can only make progress if you study the language comprehensively—seeing the character, Pinyin, and tone (more about tones in the next part).

If someone hires a native speaker to write text in Chinese and only provides the text in Pinyin, not characters, the Chinese speaker might either refuse the job or ask for double the payment. Reading a complex text written only in Pinyin without characters is difficult and unclear. Why? Read my notes, and I’ll tell you about that too!