Pinyin, more formally Hanyu Pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. Hanyu means the Chinese language, and pinyin means “spell sound”, or the spelling of the sound.

Pinyin is the most common standard for representing Standard Mandarin in the Latin alphabet. The correspondence between letter and sound does not follow any single other language, but do not depart any more from the norms of the Latin alphabet than many European languages. For example, the aspiration distinction between b, d, g and p, t, k is similar to English, but not to French. Z and c also have that distinction; however, they are pronounced as [ts] is in languages such as German, Italian, and Polish, which do not have said distinction. From s, z, c come the digraphs sh, zh, ch by analogy with English sh, ch; although this introduces the novel combination zh, it is internally consistent in how the two series are related, and represents the fact that many Chinese pronounce sh, zh, ch as s, z, c. In the x, j, q series, x rather resembles its pronunciation in Catalan, though q is more novel.