Before Pinyin, 85 percent of Chinese people could not read, according to the BBC. Now, UNICEF says the literacy rate in China hovers at about 95 percent.

Pinyin is arguably the easiest way of learning the pronunciations of characters. However, while it is mandatory for many students in Hong Kong to learn Hanyu Pinyin in Putonghua classes, Cantonese ...

Zhou Youguang, a onetime Wall Street banker from China who developed Pinyin, a Romanized writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn Mandarin, died ...