Most broadly, it is used to provide a useful way for foreigners who are not skilled at recognizing Chinese script to read and recognize Chinese. Other well-known systems include Wade–Giles (Mandarin) and Yale Romanization (Mandarin and Cantonese).There are many uses for Chinese Romanization. Linguist Daniel Kane recalls, 'It used to be said that sinologists had to be like musicians, who might compose in one key and readily transcribe into other keys.' The dominant international standard for Standard Mandarin since about 1982 has been Hanyu Pinyin, invented by a group of Chinese linguists in the 1950s including Zhou Youguang. There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chinese throughout history. Chinese uses a logographic script and its characters do not represent phonemes directly.

This understanding is reflected in the precise Fanqie system, and it is the core principle of all modern systems. Chinese dictionaries have complex and competing sorting rules for characters and romanization systems simplify the problem by listing characters in their Latin form alphabetically.The Indian Sanskrit grammarians who went to China two thousand years ago to work on the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese and the transcription of Buddhist terms into Chinese, discovered the 'initial sound', 'final sound', and 'suprasegmental tone' structure of spoken Chinese syllables. Romanization facilitates entering characters on standard keyboards such as QWERTY.

Still, the system of Gwoyeu Romatzyh (National Romanization) bypasses the issue of introducing non-letter symbols by changing the letters within the syllable, as in mha, ma, maa, mah, each of which contains the same vowel, but a different tone. Others, like Pinyin, indicate the tone with diacritics: mā, má, mǎ, mà. Certain systems such as Wade-Giles indicate tone with a number following the syllable: ma 1, ma 2, ma 3, ma 4. Tones distinguish the definition of all morphemes in Chinese, and the definition of a word is often ambiguous in the absence of tones. Aside from syllable structure, it is also necessary to indicate tones in Chinese romanization.

Allowing instant communication in 'colloquial Chinese' between Chinese and non-Chinese speakers via a phrase-book. Transcribing the citation pronunciation of specific Chinese characters according to the pronunciation conventions of a specific European language, to allow the insertion of that Chinese pronunciation into a Western text. Making the syntactic structure of Chinese intelligible to those only familiar with Latin grammar. Making the actual pronunciation conventions of spoken Chinese intelligible to non-Chinese-speaking students, especially those with no experience of a tonal language.

Unfortunately, the manuscript was misplaced in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, and not re-discovered until 1934. Note the systematic use of x where Pinyin has sh, si where Pinyin has xi, and qu (stylized qv) where Pinyin uses guThe first consistent system for transcribing Chinese words in Latin alphabet is thought to have been designed in 1583-88 by Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri for their Portuguese-Chinese dictionary — the first ever European-Chinese dictionary. Book indexing, dictionary entry sorting, and cataloguing in general.A 17th-century European map using the then-typical transcription of Chinese place names. Replacing Chinese characters to bring functional literacy to illiterate Chinese speakers. Recitation of Chinese text in one Chinese variety by literate speakers of another mutually unintelligible one, e.g. 行 as xíng (to walk behaviour, conduct) or háng (a store)).

In 1626 the Jesuit missionary Nicolas Trigault devised a romanization system in his Xiru Ermu Zi (simplified Chinese: 西儒耳目资 traditional Chinese: 西儒耳目資 pinyin: Xīrú ěrmù zī literally: Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati). By Michał Boym and his two Chinese assistants in the first publication of the original and Romanized text of the Nestorian Stele, which appeared in China Illustrata (1667) — an encyclopedic-scope work compiled by Athanasius Kircher. Cattaneo's system, with its accounting for the tones, was not lost, however. This work has also been lost but not rediscovered. During the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help of his Jesuit colleague Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640), compiled a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary as well, in which tones of the romanized Chinese syllables were indicated with diacritical marks.

In their missionary activities they had contact with many languages in Southeast Asia, and they created systems that could be used consistently across all of the languages with which they were concerned. Later on, many linguistically comprehensive systems were made by the Protestants, such as that used for Robert Morrison's dictionary and the Legge romanization. His Spanish language Vocabulario de la lengua Mandarina was published in 1682 and his Arte de la lengua mandarina, published in 1703, is the earliest known published Chinese grammar.

The Yale system taught Mandarin using spoken, colloquial Chinese patterns. This system was used for a long time, because it was used for phrase-books and part of the Yale system of teaching Chinese. It uses a more regular spelling of Mandarin phonemes than other systems of its day.

A new voluntary working subcommittee was independently formed by a group of five scholars who strongly advocated romanization. The political circumstances of the time prevented any positive outcome from the formation of this unit. In 1923, the Kuomintang Ministry of Education instituted a National Language Unification Commission which, in turn, formed an eleven-member romanization unit. Some people also invented other phoneme systems. It was used to write the sounds of the Xiamen dialect of Southern Min.

The entire system could be written with a standard QWERTY keyboard.the call to abolish characters in favour of a romanized alphabet reached a peak around 1923. The most distinctive aspect of this new system was that, rather than relying upon marks or numbers, it indicated the tonal variations of the 'root syllable' by a systematic variation within the spelling of the syllable itself. 'National Language Romanization') system, proclaimed on 26 September 1928. They developed the Gwoyeu Romatzyh ( Chinese: 国语罗马字 pinyin: Guóyǔ Luómǎzì lit.

Latinxua Sinwenz The work towards constructing the Latinxua Sinwenz ( Chinese: 拉丁化新文字 pinyin: Lādīnghuà Xīn Wénzì lit. The complexity of its tonal system was such that it was never popular. Despite the fact that it was created to eventually replace Chinese characters, and that it was constructed by linguists, Gwoyeu Romatzyh was never extensively used for any purpose other than delivering the pronunciation of specific Chinese characters in dictionaries.

Chinese Hanyu Pinyin