Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world, estimated to be spoken by more than 1.2 billion people in countries like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia. With so many ...

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 ...

A portrait taken in Beijing in 1974 of Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai. In 1955, Zhou Enlai invited Zhou Youguang to simplify Chinese characters and devise a new alphabet, so that Mandarin could be ...

Zhou Youguang, known as the father of Pinyin for creating the system of Romanized Chinese writing that has become the international standard since its introduction some 60 years ago, died Saturday in ...