Use pinyin not Wade-Giles

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I would suggest that everyone should use pinyin to transliterate Chinese names, not Wade-Giles. There are several reasons for this:

  1. Most Putonghua (more commonly known as Mandarin) speakers today (i.e. those in China) use pinyin, not Wade-Giles. Pinyin has been officially approved by the Chinese government.
  2. The pronunciation of Pinyin is much more intuitive for English speakers than Wade-Giles.
  3. Most current scholarly work on China is done with pinyin, not Wade-Giles, and in the long run the use of pinyin at Wade-Giles' expense will only increase.
  4. Most English speakers forget to write the apostrophes in Wade-Giles, which completely changes the meaning of the text. Pinyin, by contrast, doesn't have any apostrophes. (Pinyin actually does have some apostrophes, e.g. Tian'anmen)

Even where a name is more commonly known with Wade-Giles (e.g. Tao), I would recommend still writing it in pinyin, and then adding the Wade-Giles transliteration after it in brackets. Where an article title is a Chinese name, use pinyin as the article name, and create a redirect from the Wade-Giles to the pinyin. Hopefully that way we can help wean the public of the Wade-Giles system :) A particular problem is that English speakers seeing Wade-Giles transliterations are likely to give widely inaccurate pronunciations; an English-speakers pronunciation of pinyin won't be perfect, but will be much closer to real Putonghua.

The only exception to this rule is in quotes; if you quote another source, do not change its transliteration system, though you may add the pinyin after it in brackets. Changing other people's quotes is bad.

I disagree with this strongly. While less common names and words might be better to use in pinyin, because it has been emerging as a scholarly consensus, familiar words which are well-known in English should retain their spelling and (more importantly!) pronunciation. There's no reason to run after every fashion in transliteration and try to change language doing so.

But the transliteration is outdated, and the pronunciations are down right incorrect. And if, as I have proposed, always use REDIRECTS, and put the Wade-Giles in brackets, anyone unfamiliar with pinyin names should quickly understand what we are talking about. -- Simon J Kissane
There is no "incorrect" in language, there's just usage. At least that's the point of view of the science in question, linguistics. If you use scientific arguments to promote pinyin over other schemes, then the same science will tell you that calling a well-established and recognised form "incorrect" is simply wrong and has no scientific basis. --AV
I know I said I was going to relent, but I've just got one more thing to add: Linguistics won't tell you that a well-established and recognized form is incorrect; but it won't tell you it is correct either. I agree that linguistics doesn't say the form is correct; but you seem to be saying that it says the most commmon and well-established form is correct, which it doesn't say either. Linguistics cannot say anything about correctness; it is descriptive, not prescriptive. But it does not therefore follow that we should not follow any prescriptions, just because linguistics doesn't make any.
There are at least two different reasons if any language which lead people to consider a form correct or incorrect. Firstly, the frequency of its use. Secondly, the logic behind its use. Now the logic behind the use "Taoism" is bad. But on the other hand it is more commonly used. Linguistics is absolutely irrelevant in choosing which reason to follow. -- Simon J Kissane
I agree that linguistics doesn't say anything one way or the other (although great many linguists would actually disagree with this, but that's a topic for another debate). But my original point was that you shouldn't rely on the science being on your side here. That is, if you use the authoritative force of science (linguistics) to argue for the benefit of the pinyin versions, I will counteract with the argument from the same science to say that it has no justification at all for trying to force a prescriptive change in the language. That was my argument: that you have a blessing from linguistics to argue that pinyin is better than Wade-Giles, but you have no blessing at all to continue from that to desirability of changing existing English words to conform to pinyin.
As for logic, well, language evolution eschews it, as any quick glance into any random etymological dictionary proves beyond doubt. --AV


The purpose of the encyclopaedia is not to educate readers about benefits of the new, it is to inform readers about the wonders of the existing. With Taoism/Daoism, for instance, it suffices to Google both words (not to mention survey a few dictionaries) to see what is the accepted word in the English (sic! not Chinese!) language. --AV

That's why we have redirect!! It doesn't matter what they say they're looking for as long as they wind up on the "right" page.

Another way of looking at this. It's possible that the "traditional" spelling of a word should be considered obsolete.

We are not in business of trying to change the language! I don't know how I can articulate this more clearly. We are in the business of explaining to people what there is, not what we think should be. "Daoism" may be more correct in your opinion, and "Taoism" may be worth abolishing, but it has not been abolished in the English language and is in fact the known and accepted form, while "Daoism" is a freaky variant. The encyclopaedia should reflect this undeniable fact. --AV


I don't necessarily agree with you here :-), but Simon J Kissane is apparently trying to come up with a good compromise.

Hats off to all Wikipedians trying to do the Right Thing. :-)

I am sympathetic to your point here, AV, but shouldn't an encyclopedia reflect what is current practice among experts of the field, rather than among the general public? A dictionary should reflect public usage, but Wikipedia is not a dictionary--it's an encyclopedia. It's where people come to learn about things in more depth than mere definitions and descriptions of common usage. Since "Taoism", etc., are common use, I'd expect a search for that to turn up something--and it will. It will redirect to the page "Daoism", which will begin with a line that says something like "Daoism (or Taoism)..."; the article will tell me about the subject, and also give me the impression that the "D" version is preferred among experts, which is correct. --Lee Daniel Crocker

I am sympathetic to your point here, AV, but shouldn't an encyclopedia reflect what is current practice among experts of the field, rather than among the general public?

In knowledge, yes, but not in language usage. Experts in Chinese are not expers about English language usage! They are no more privileged to dictate "correct" form of English words than you and I.

In fact, the experts on the issue are philosophers, not specialists in Chinese linguistics. In my experience, philosophers which refer to the religion/philosophy in question continue to call it "Taoism" with rare exceptions.

I agree that Wikipedia should point out that some people consider "Daoism" to be the more correct form. This doesn't mean that Wikipedia should go against prevailing usage and with transliteration fashions. I tried to achieve some first approximation of the NeutralPointOfView with my latest edits. --AV

I agree that pinyin should be used for Chinese transliteration, but many words in English have been assimilated from other languages and now make up part of the English vocabulary. The word "Taoism" is an English word, not transliterated Chinese. -- STG

I think the spelling of scholars of things Chinese, especially scholars of Chinese religion, should be more normative than the average persons. I do not actually know which one they prefer, though I'm pretty sure that they probably use "Daoism" more than average (even if it is only used by a minority even of scholars, which it may be.) -- Simon J Kissane

Look at the US government website Library of Congress Pinyin Conversion project on this issue and all those consequences after the switch over. As a native Chinese speaker, I can tell you the Wade-Giles system sucks. It bastardized the Chinese language for a century and half and created a hugh disconnection between the original Chinese language and what the English language tries to refer to. I am glad the US government and Library of Congress abandoned the Wade-Giles system. I understand that it was a system that a wealth of knowledge was built on (and may I add, with incorrect pronunciations learned by millions and billions of English speaking scholars over the century.) The Wade-Giles system failed because it could not accurately reproduced the pronunciation. We cannot blame them because they were not native Chinese speakers. Wade-Giles was adopted because there were no significanly different alternative nor a driving force for a better standard. The western world didn't care one way or the other because as long as they can communicate among themselves is okay. With the Chinese government behind it, pinyin becomes a better way to transliterate Chinese. Does the English language really needs it? Probably not. Just like Deutschland is called Germany in the English language for centuries with no problem, it works as long as the system is consistent. However, should Wikipedia use pinyin? You bet. If the Library of Congress is switching over, it becomes the standard at least in the US.

I'm sure this is all quite true, but the point is that Taoism and words like it are now part of the English language, even if sounds like nonsense to a Chinese speaker, and as I understand things we try to call it as we see it, not how we'd like it to be. --Robert Merkel

I don't disagree that Taoism should stay (at least for a cross reference). Because the western knowledge base was built upon the Wade-Giles system, it is just silly to drop the word Taoism entirely. However you must consider that all publications coming out of China will be using pinyin hence you will expect to see Daoism more than Taoism from the Chinese source. If you think Taoism is a western philosophy, then stick with Taoism. But if you consider it a Chinese philosophy, Daoism makes more sense because it is closer to the source.

This is a somewhat silly argument. Judaism is called "yahadut" in Hebrew, and in fact the word "Judaism" in English has its roots in the Hebrew root of "yahadut". But noone is advocating users of the English language to start calling Judaism "yahadut", and even if the Israeli government mandated the use of this non-word (in the English language) instead of "Judaism" in official publications, I suspect the English-speaking world wouldn't so much as blink. The point is, words are arbitrary. They have etymologies, but those are things of the past, not of the present; they are reasons the word came into existence, not reasons why it continues to exist. There's no reason for the word's continuing existence besides the common agreement of all language users to use and understand that word. If the phonology of Chinese changes drastically in the next 100 years and "Dao" will come to be pronounced like "Fao", that will provide no reason at all to change the English word yet again into "Faoism". It's an English word, albeit with Chinese roots, not a Chinese word. --AV
The Hebrew example does not fit here because the Israeli government does not publish Hebrew text in roman transliteration but the Chinese government does. There are romanized Chinese books in China which looks like Western publication, but read like Chinese. They are published for illiterates or foreigners who can speak Chinese, but cannot read or recognize Chinese characters. I know romanized Chinese is not English, but Chinese scholars will write all Chinese terms in pinyin in English publications. The Jews do not publish books in romanized Hebrew, the Chinese does. That is the driving force that makes a different and the Hebrew example lacks that.

Languages evolve. English Language is not an exception. You cannot resist the change when there was a driving force as strong as a standard from the Chinese government. Just think about the terms Peking vs. Beijing. Do you think the term Peking will ever be forgotten? No, there were tons of literature using that term. Do you think people will still use the term Peking moving forward when the Chinese government uses Beijing? Taoism vs Daoism is in the same situation. The change is inevitable whether you like it or not. My vote is that Wikipedia should go with the pinyin standard. That is the future, but we cannot forget the past.

The change might be inevitable, and it might not be -- plenty of word of foreign origin in English survived unharmed drastic changes in their source languages' phonetics, not to mention spelling or romanisation. Time will show, and we, as encyclopaedia authors, have no prerogative, obligation or indeed reason to second-guess time. Right now "Taoism" is overwhelmingly the better-known and better-recognised spelling, and it should remain the main entry. --AV
let me give a better example than "Deutsch" = "German". "Deutsch" in American English was often translated as DUTCH, hence, the Pennsylvania Dutch, who were German, or men with the nickname Dutch in the 19th century, who were German. Dutch is a reasonable facsimile of Deutsch, just as Dao and Tao are much closer than some of this argument would admit. On the other hand, is anyone trying to get us to use the Pinyin for Confucius? --MicahelTinkler
I vote for redirecting Confucius to the pinyin version because the pinyin is how his name should be called. The redirection support backward compatibility for the English term. To draw an analogy, I always think it is silly for English speaking Christians to pray to Jesus all their life without knowing that they put the wrong address on the prayers. If you want His attention, at least address Him by the name that He called Himself. Try pray to Yesu next time, your prayer may be answered for the first time if it is delivered to the right address. :-)
Oh, dear. That's linguistically, philosophically, and theologically suspect. ; ) --MichaelTinkler

One wonders what those so stringently opposed to English versions of names think we should do with Charlemagne, who was called different names (Carolus Magnus, Karl der Grosse) in different tongues even while he lived.

A few thoughts:

My first is that this entire argument is a bit odd, in an encyclopedia that explicitly tells us that we aren't preferring US or UK spelling, that either is fine.

The second is that this is an English-language wikipedia, and as such, why should it follow putonghua rather than Cantonese or the other Chinese languages? Yes, I know putonghua is the official language of the People's Republic of China--that doesn't make it official for pronouncing borrowed English words.

Third, related to second, is that English spelling of English isn't phonetic, and can't be, because we don't all pronounce English the same way.

Oh, and I know few native English speakers for whom the X and Q in pinyin are intuitive. Having studied Spanish before I laid eyes on pinyin, I have to remind myself that X is closer to /sh/ than to /h/. Wade-Giles is similarly flawed: either requires the English-speaker to memorize some new values for consonants (and vowels, since ao isn't a native English digraph). --Vicki Rosenzweig

I agree, it's a bit of an odd argument. The first aim, I think, should be usability - that people get to what they're looking for. Therefore, I'd support conscientious redirecting whenever either transliteration is preferred.

But in general it looks like pinyin is gaining the upper hand in usage, and therefore we should use it on Wikipedia. "Beijing" is widely accepted as current. As for the Confucius example - personally, I'd moderate my speech depending on who I was talking to, as I'm sure would many others. In the past few years I've learned, thanks to pinyin I suppose, that "Kung Fu-Tze" is a more accurate pronunciation, but I'd still use "Confucius" if it made me more comprehensible to the person I was talking to.

In summary - pro-pinyin, with strong recommendations that redirects be used extensively. mswake~

Regarding pronunciation, it’s true that both Wade-Giles and Pinyin have new rules you must learn in order to pronounce the words right, but as for writing, my opinion is that Wade-Giles is more easily misinterpreted than Pinyin. Take for example the famous internal Chinese martial art, which with Wade-Giles is spelled as “T'ai Chi Ch'üan”. I’ve met many people (including myself) who thought this “Chi” had the same meaning as the “Ch'i” in “Ch'i Kung”. Pinyin writes this “Taijiquan” and “Qigong”, which are much easier to separate for outsiders, and are easier to write (no apostrophes needed, so there’s no risk in forgetting them). As of now, though, the article in Wikipedia for Taijiquan is placed in w:Tai Chi Chuan and the one about Qigong in w:Qigong. This, I believe, will just confuse the readers: why Wade-Giles is used in one article and Pinyin in the other - even if the opposite Romanization of the terms is mentioned in both articles. If one starts mixing the spellings together, people who feel it important to spell things “correctly”, but don’t know the differences, will have difficulties knowing which spelling to use when Wade-Giles is used in one article and Pinyin in another, and readers who know the differences might regard it as sloppy work and not thoroughly considered.
Another thing to note is that Pinyin is almost always used when specifying tones (usually in parenthesis together with the Chinese characters), so when Wade-Giles is used in the title and the article, but Pinyin for the tones, it makes a bad mix as well.

I think it’s a bit unfair to the readers to not take these kinds of things into consideration, as I myself have long been a victim to this confusion before I began studying basic Chinese. What I’m saying is that I only want Wikipedia to be what I was looking for a couple of years ago when I was constantly searching for information about Chinese martial art terms, both their meaning and the most correct way of spelling them. What was important to me then, like it is today, was that I wanted to use the same Romanization system for all terms; and after much researching and consideration I realized that I found Pinyin the more logical of the two.

One of the great things with Wikipedia is that, in contrary to an encyclopedia in book-form, we are not forced to choose a spelling that will be the only word available when a user wants to look it up. Instead, we can add articles of all the different spellings (Wade-Giles, Yale etc.) and just redirect the reader to the Pinyin article containing the information, and the reader can search for whatever spelling he likes and still end up where he intended to. We can also, if we like, have a separate article dedicated solely to a certain spelling, explaining why it has become popular, and that it’s now outdated though commonly used; and from there direct users to the Pinyin spelling that contains the main article with information. Thus, outside articles can choose to link to any spelling they wish, and the user will still end up in the right place, where they’ll find information about both the meaning of the term and the different ways of spelling it. The summary is that in Wikipedia there will never be any worries about what is the most common term searched for, as this is easily solved with redirects and links.

- Wintran 23:57 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)


Completely agree. Simply put, the title should be written in Pinyin and other transliteration format including Wade-Giles should only be redirects. - Ktsquare
In cases where Pinyin and another transliteration are used and recognized by roughly equal proportions of English speakers then we should use Pinyin as the main page title. But in cases where a non-Pinyin transliteration is used and understood by a majority of English speakers at all familiar with the subject then we must use that form as the main title and redirect the Pinyin form to it - not the other way around. Doing otherwise would be a violation of en.wikis common names naming convention. So Yes Beijing, No to Peking and Yes to Confucius but No to Kung Fu-Tze. Also, Pinyin should always at least be a redirect so that people who use it exclusively are not lost - but en.wikis general common usage naming convention always trumps special naming conventions for words like "Confucius." --Maveric149
I think few English speakers will know what "Kong Fuzi" is! But another thing needs to be considered is that pinyin system is not yet perfect. Hard to type is one thing, there is not a specific rule for how to transliterate a Chinese word correctly. Words are not so obvious as English are in Chinese, where there is not space between words. Romanization calls for that(i can't imagine a string of English without spaces). But there seems no a specific rule for that, esp. auxiliary word, we don't even know which should be counted as a "word" and separate it. That would be very confused since there is not a standard spelling. Like which one should be correct? "Kong Fuzi" or "Kong Fu-zi" or "Kong fuzi" or "Kong fu-zi"? But I am not saying that pinyin is not worth using, just complaining why PRC government doesn't do anything to that? ;p --Gboy 05:31, 4 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Kong Fu Zi, and there is a way to write pinyin. All names have a space and all syllables have a space, you cannot combine them its justliketypinglikethis. I would still go for typing the pinyin Kong Fu Zi[Confucious], Jiang Jie Shi[Chiang Kai Shek] -- Originally unsigned by 4.65.114.33 16:32, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Actually, the Chinese government has set up rules on how to write Pinyin. See this site:
Basic Rules of Hanyu Pinyin Orthography (Summary)
According to the rules, "When the surname of historically well-known figures is combined with a respectful or descriptive term by which they are commonly known, the syllables are linked, and the first letter is capitalized. For example: Kǒngzǐ (Confucius),..."
So "Kong Fu Zi" is incorrect. The alternative name for "Kongzi" should be "Kongfuzi", applying the same rule stated above. If we apply the "personal name and the person’s professional title are separated" rule instead, say for some other teachers with the surname "Kong", the standard spelling should be "Kong fuzi".
For "Chiang Kai-shek", we should apply the rule: "Surnames and given names are written separately in the Chinese Han language. The first letters of surnames and the given names are capitalized." The standard spelling is "Jiang Jieshi".
Although I like Pinyin, but I do not think unifying all Chinese related things using Pinyin to be the best solution for an English Encyclopedia. For terms that are well-known in the English language like "Confucius" and "Taoism", keep them as they are. They are no longer Wade-Giles. They are English. Anyway, Pinyin for "Taoism" is not "Daoism" but "Dàojiào".
-- Felix Wan 01:26, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree with the conclusions, but not the methods used to reach them. Yes, Wikipedia has to (not "should") use Pinyin. This is simply a case of majority pressure. The drastic conversion to Pinyin in academia (largely in the last 15-20 years) makes that inevitable. However, things are being said that are just not true: 1) Wade-Giles is inferior in phonetic representation. This is simply untrue. Anything that Pinyin can represent, Wade-Giles can represent just as well. I challenge anybody to produce a pair of Chinese words which are distinct in Pinyin but ambiguous in Wade-Giles. 2) Pinyin is more "intuitive" for English speakers. This is also untrue. No English speaker would recognize the pronunciation intended for x, q, c, or zh in Pinyin and is likely to mispronounce, e.g. "cao" as "kao". Wade-Giles "ts'ao" is more likely to be pronounced correctly. Moreover, while the usage of b/p vs. p/p' (for instance) may give English speakers a distinction they can start out with, it also universally creates the misapprehension that the distinction in Chinese is one of voice rather than aspiration, and probably has degraded the ability of English-speakers to pronounce Chinese accurately -- although since that has always been bad maybe you can hardly tell. 3) Pinyin has redundant contrasts: x vs. sh, j vs. zh, q vs. ch, which are always determined by the following vowel. The fact that it allows Pinyin to dispense with umlauted ü in some words (e.g. Py. ju /zhu vs. W-G chü / chu) is typographically meaningless when ü has to be resorted to, once more, to write e.g. nü, lü. Apparent contrasts like xi/si (W-G hsi/szu) exist, but this obscures the fact that the i in question represents two different vowels. 4) Pinyin has made some very weird choices. On the one hand, spellings like tian or gui (where W-G has t'ien, kuei) are arguably phonemically accurate, but they misrepresent the sound, suggesting to the reader the pronunciations tyahn and gooee (not the somewhat closer tyen, gway). But why keep the poor choice made by Wade-Giles in representing what is phonetically [au] or [aw] as "ao"? The one decent choice Pinyin made was in substituting "r" for Wade-Giles "j"; while "r" is not exactly right, "j" is certainly wrong. 5) To a native reader of English, Pinyin is an aesthetic disaster, making a beautiful and mellifluous language look harsh and clashing. However, that's all water under the bridge. If Wade-Giles was no worse than Pinyin, it wasn't much better, and both of them have failed on the obvious matter of representing the tones well.

However, I should point out that the current situation is by no means the end of the story. Empires rise and fall, and so do orthographic systems; Pinyin itself is less than 40 years old. It may well be that in 20-30 years we'll all be using some other system: maybe even Gwoyeu Romatzyh!

Mandarin is not an European language, it is impossible to use roman letters to precisely represent Mandarin without adding some special non-English phonetic codes, e.g. the x, q, c etc. in pinyin use non-English pronounciation. English speakers are very good in changing pronunciation of English words based on the word's language of origin. For example, people read San Jose, CA as San Ho-Say, California because everyone knows the transliteration was Spanish based, so they won't read the J as the English J. Likewise, people in Chicago, IL call their own town Shi-CA-GO, EE-Lin-Noi, because these native American names were first transliterated using French pronunication rules, and local people knows to read the Chi the French way and make the trailing S in Illinois silent like Paris read the French way. Does everyone know how to pronounce these words correctly? I heard many newscasts in California read Chicago, IL using English pronunciation. In China, many people would read San Jose the English way instead of the Spanish way. When English people read pinyin, they will definitely mispronounce the x, q and c, just like the Spanish J and the French S is mispronounced in English. But those are not excuse to judge the phonetic system as flawed. You want most pinyin words pronouncible by English speakers without much training, but they must learn the special symbols for the special sounds. I see no difference in these exception handlings between a pinyin Q vs. a Spanish J and a French S. In all these cases, the English readers must learn how to break the regular English rules to read non-English words correctly. Aside from some exceptions, pinyin sounds more like Mandarin when read as English by layman, more so than Wades-Giles. I guess a simple experiment can easily prove the point. Find a English reader with no pinyin training, and a Mandarin listener with no English background. Let the English reader read a passage encoded in pinyin and in Wades-Giles, let the listener write down the bo-po-mo-fo of what he hears. I would bet my lunch that pinyin will produce more matches than WG and win by a wide margin. I won't disagree with you that a trained pinyin reader and a trained WG reader probably will perform the same. Only the layman test will show the differences in these two systems. 67.117.82.2 20:24, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
For someone to read pinyin aloud and be understood by a native Chinese speaker, that person would have to had training in Chinese and pinyin. If the average English speaker read pinyin as if was English, I would suggest the result would be completely unintelligible to a native Chinese speaker. Even if you ignored tone, some of the consonants and most of the vowels would be wrong. Pinyin is a romanisation; it uses roman letters to write the Chinese language, it does not using English spelling, or any other spelling of any other language, although most of the consonants are similar to Engish and the vowels are similar to Italian/Spanish/IPA. For the untrained person, pinyin in some ways is better than Wade-Giles, eg pinyin b/p, d/t are closer to English b/p, d/t than Wade-Giles p/p’, t/t’. Also pinyin spelling is not completely regular, eg “dui”, “shui” are actually pronounced “duei” and “shuei”, and “-uei” on its own is written as “wei”.

Would it help a little bit that the Wade-Giles "J," which becomes the Pinyin "R," to have an apostrophe after it (as in the WG transliterations of such Chinese consonants that retain their English sounds, as "Ch'," "K'," and "T'" which in Pinyin are "Q," "K" and "T" respectively), so that it becomes known as "J'" in WG? Therefore, what is Beijing in Pinyin would alternatively in WG be known as [i]Pei-j'ing[/i] rather than "Pei-ching" or "Peking" Similarly, Tsinan would be J'inan instead of Chinan, Jiangsu (Pinyin) becomes J'iang-su rather than Chiang-su, and the name of actress Ziyi Zhang would, in this alternative form of WG Chinese, becomes Ziyi J'ang, and so forth. WikiPro1981X 06:03, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Pinyin is an incorrect form of Romanization presumably created by Chinese ignorant in how English works. In Pinyin, the letter "Q" makes a ch sound. Does that seem logical to anyone? "Q" is supposed to make a k sound.--71.107.171.45 04:21, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

A few points to aid a confused fellow-netizen:

  • "ignorant in [sic] how English works"
    • This point is entirely irrelevant. Pinyin is a system for writing Mandarin, not English, or French, or Swahili, or any other language.
  • "Does that seem logical to anyone? "Q" is supposed to make a k"
    • The first sound of the German word Jugend is very different from the first sound of the English word jug. This is not a problem, because these are different writing systems, for different languages. In the same way, the fact that the form q represents different sounds in English and pinyin is not a problem.
    • Some might question whether the forms used to write though, rough, through, etc., are entirely "logical".

IMHO, Hanyu pinyin is a work of genius for the purpose of learning Mandarin. 79.73.45.86 00:47, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

We should always mention the Wade-Giles in articles on subjects notable before the introduction of pinyin. Not doing so is a disservice to the reader: how else can one look up a reference to en:Chang Hsueh-liang, or the Han traveller en:Chang-k'ien, unless those text strings are in Wikipedia? (Both are mentioned, by those names - and not, of course, pinyin - in sources published in the 1930's and 1940's.)

I will add that the claim that pinyin is more intuitive for a native English speaker is simply false. The pinyin c, for example, is borrowed from Polish; unless the English speaker happens to know and think of an Eastern European language, it will appear utterly arbitrary; even if he does, it will be unnatural. Pmanderson 21:42, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

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