So begins one of the most beautiful and well-known Tang dynasty poems, Farewell, composed by Wang Wei (AD699-761). To spell out this passage using Hanyu pinyin, mainland China’s official system of ...

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 Romanised writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn to read and write ...

Sending a text message in Mandarin is no big deal today. The software handles so much of the work that it’s easy to miss what’s happening behind the scenes. That everyday process came after decades of ...