The Romanization System - Pingyam

When you want to learn Cantonese the conventional way, you need to first be able to somehow read and write the chinese characters. You can imagine that with the hughe abundance of different chinese characters and chinese signs you would spend the first few years, just studying the writing system.

Yale University and others have developed a 'western' system to write down the sounds of the Chinese (not just the Cantonese) language. It's called 'Pingyam' or 'Romanization System'.

The Romanization system uses the western alphabet to approximate Cantonese pronunciation. It always includes a tone mark to define at what pitch to a word needs to be pronounced. Pingyam provides a phonetic alphabet for the Chinese language. Such a phonetic alphabet does otherwise not exist for Chinese. This phonetic system facilitates learning, as otherwise non Chinese people would have an extremely difficult time learning Cantonese, Mandarin or any other Chinese dialect.

For any Westerns who want aserious studyof Cantonese, learning a romanization system is very important. Pingyam is the romanization of the Chinese "write sound." Romanization approximates Cantonese pronunciation with Western spellings and includes a tone mark to signify at what pitch to say a word. This provides a phonetic alphabet for Chinese, which otherwise would not have one. Without this, a non-native would have an extremely difficult time learning the language.

The Romanization system (Pingyam) is not the same as the Egnlish alphabet and letters. The symbols are similar and pretty close to the way they are used in the English language, but they represnet Chinese sounds. In the Chinese languages, sounds are extremely important and can change the meaning of a word drastically, it's therefore very important to follow the correct pronunciation.

Cantonese Pronunciation

The Chinese language differentiates the following pitches:

• High Tone
• High Falling
• Mid Tone
• Mid Rising
• Low Tone
• Low Rising
• Low Falling

Other Romanization Systems

There are many Romanization Systems for Cantonese. Most modern reference books and textbooks are now using the Yale romanization, but there are older systems that were used in older references (i.e. Sydney-Lau or  Meyer-Wempe) .

A new romanization system, called "Jyutping" was adopted by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993. While few reference books have been published which use this system and most western universities continue to use the Yale "Pingyam" , "Jyutping" is likely to enjoy increasing popularity in future.

Definition of 'Romanization'

In linguistics, romanization (or latinization, also spelled romanisation or latinisation) is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system (or none). Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, for representing the spoken word. (Wikipedia)