FEW people live to 111. Fewer still leave as big a mark on linguistic lives as Zhou Youguang, who died on January 14th. Mr Zhou was the chief architect of pinyin, the system that the Chinese use to ...

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 ...

Today’s Google doodle pays homage to the Chinese linguist Zhou Youguang on what would have been his 112th birthday. Youguang helped create the Chinese phonetic alphabet called Pinyin. He spent three ...

Described as “the father of Pinyin“, or Chinese phonetic language, and hailed as the man who simplified Chinese, Zhou Youguang would have been 112 this Saturday. In his honour, Google is changing its ...

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 ...

Ministry of Education statistics from 2021 underscored this trend, revealing that over 25 million individuals overseas were engaged in learning Chinese at the time. Notably, Duolingo had over 12.9 ...