Why do you need pinyin in Chinese

The Chinese language is made up of characters. Accordingly, you need to know how each hieroglyph is read in order to pronounce it. This was the case before the invention of pinyin in the 1950s.

What is Pinyin in simple words?

Pinyin is a system for writing each character in letters. For example, here is the hieroglyph for the word “mother” - 妈妈. You won't be able to read it if you don't know this hieroglyph. However, thanks to the Pinyin system, you can!

How do you say this in pinyin?

After all, in Pinyin this character will be written like this - māma. Even without special reading skills in the Pinyin system, you can roughly understand that “mother” is written here.

Thus, if you master the Pinyin system, you will be able to understand how to read any character in Chinese.