What is Pinyin?

Pinyin is the official system in mainland China, Singapore and Taiwan for transcribing Standard Chinese with the Latin alphabet. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is normally written using Chinese characters. Pinyin without tone marks is often used in foreign publications to spell Chinese names familiar to non-Chinese and may be used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into computers. The word pīnyīn (Chinese: 拼音) literally means "spelled-out sounds".

The "wrong" answers are related to three similar-sounding words:

(1) Pinin is the name for the protein mentioned.

(2) Piyi is the name of a crater on Mars.

(3) Pingyin is the name of a county under the administration of Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, China.

More Info: en.wikipedia.org

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45 Comments

Gail S

I missed the question, but thanks for explaining what the other possible answers really are.

Yanni

Missed, learned!

Cujo

Tour not your.

Cujo

Spice girls, was guitarist for leg of your, was called Old Spice. Ann Margret, said I nailed it, only wish THAT was true.

Peter Thomas

Good question and explanation. And for once the options weren’t ridiculous!

June

I've been to China, so knew this.

Conrado De Leon

I knew the term spelled "pidgin".

vivshops

Liked the way this one was done

Andy the educated troglodyte

I wonder if that is where 'pidgin english' came from ?

dlh

Did not know this answer. Thanks for the info.

Don Racette

Kay Eicher Another unlucky one for me.

Cheryl McMeekin

Lucky guess

littledick

I studied Chinese using the Yale system of romanization, which, as far as I'm concerned is better for American English than pinyin. Also, in the Yale system, tones are indicated, but since we were learning Mandarin only four of them were shown. Cantonese, or Guangdung Hua has a couple more tones, I believe. Finally, Chinese is a language only in its written form, or as a family of languages. Mandarin is sometimes referred to as a dialect of Chinese. It is not. Beijinghua (Pekingese) is a dialect of Mandarin, it is not a dialect of a dialect! In other words one does not speak Chinese (unless one commonly means Mandarin - and that is technically in error), one writes it. Those who speak Polish, Czech, etc., don't say they speak Slavic.