Own Chinese pinyin

[Michalis]

I understood from my girlfriend that Chinese have their own style of "pinyin" meant to expres the pronnunciation of characters. But this method consists of characters itself. Is that true?

[ichi]

Kind of.

Where is your girlfriend from? (I'm guessing Taiwan?)

Roman-letter pinyin is pretty much the standard for schools outside of China, and it is the system used for romanisation within China for learning materials and such.

Taiwanese students I believe are taught a system of phoneticization which has sounds equivalent to those of pinyin syllables, but use a particular series of simple characters.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Dear Michalis,

Go to the following discussion threads to find out more about the zhuyin (bo po mo fo) method for representing the sounds of Mandarin syllables:

http://www.chinalanguage.com/forum/read ... =246&t=217

http://www.chinalanguage.com/forum/read ... 851&t=5851

Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.

P.S. I used the pseudonym of Nancy (my boss) to answer a guy from Estonia (I guess).

[lin]

Taiwanese students are taught a particular system.
If you want a copy of that system, download here.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/

select Bopomofo(U3100.pdf)