Glossary
Pinyin
Pinyin, also called Hanyu Pinyin, is the system that spells Mandarin Chinese syllables with the Latin alphabet and marks the tones with diacritics. People type Chinese by spelling the sound in Pinyin and choosing the character they want, and speech tools must choose among characters that share one Pinyin spelling.
Updated October 17, 20264 cited facts, each traced to its source
Also called Hanyu Pinyin.
Pinyin is the romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese. It writes each syllable with the Latin alphabet, and it marks the four tones with diacritics. For example, nǐ hǎo is the Pinyin spelling of "hello". The full name, Hanyu Pinyin, means "Han language spelling", and it is the system China uses in its schools and official writing.
Pinyin writes the sound of each character
Chinese characters do not show how they sound, so Pinyin gives each character a spelling based on its pronunciation. Tone matters: mā, má, mǎ and mà are four different syllables, and each one is a different word. The tone marks are therefore part of the spelling, which makes them diacritics in the usual sense.
Pinyin also has an international role. A 1986 UN working paper recalls that a UN conference recommended adopting Pinyin as the international system for romanizing Chinese geographical names 1.
People type Chinese by spelling the sound in Pinyin
To type Chinese on a computer or phone, you spell the Pinyin for the word and then pick the character you want from a list of candidates. The software that turns Latin letters into characters is an input method editor. Typing a syllable brings up every character with that sound, so one short spelling can lead to several choices.
Pinyin input is also measurably slower than speaking Mandarin. In a controlled study on an iPhone, Mandarin entered by speech reached 123 words per minute, against 43 words per minute with the built-in Pinyin keyboard, 2.87 times faster 2 3. The participants transcribed short messages in a laboratory, so a long document or a noisy room will produce different figures.
Many characters share one Pinyin spelling
The same problem that makes homophones hard in English appears in Mandarin, and it is larger. Many characters share a Pinyin syllable, so a speech recognizer that hears shi must choose one character from many, using the words around it. Native speakers do not always agree where one word ends and the next begins: in one study their agreement on word boundaries was about 75 percent 4. Because of that, researchers usually score Mandarin recognition by character error rate, not by word error rate.
What to check when you dictate Mandarin
Speak each syllable clearly, tones included, then read the output for characters that sound right but do not fit the sentence. A wrong character with the right sound is one kind of Mandarin dictation error, and a reader is the one who usually catches it. Our guide to Japanese, Chinese and Korean speech to text explains how Mandarin dictation is set up on each platform, and the question on whether Chinese voice input is faster than typing works through the speed comparison.
Related terms
- Diacritics: the tone marks in Pinyin are diacritics.
- Input method editor (IME): the software that converts Pinyin letters into characters.
- Transliteration: writing a language in another script, which Pinyin does for Mandarin.
- Homophone: words that sound the same but are written differently.
Guides and questions that cover it
Evidence
Every number on this page, with where it comes from. Open a fact to see the exact words in its source.
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- 4.In tests of word boundary marking by native Mandarin speakers, their agreement on where the word boundaries fall was about 75 percent, so the authors use character error rate as the usual metric for Mandarin speech recognition.
Xunying Liu et al., Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013 · Original
Related terms
- Dictation Languages, Accents and Voice TranslationThe topic this term belongs to
- AccentAn accent is the way a speaker pronounces a language, shaped by where they grew up, their first language or their community. Accents change pronunciation, not vocabulary, and speech recognition error rates can differ sharply from one accent to another.
- Character error rate (CER)Character error rate (CER) is the number of character insertions, substitutions and deletions needed to turn a recognizer's output into the correct text, divided by the number of characters in the correct text. It is the usual measure where words are not separated by spaces.
- Code-switchingCode-switching is the habit of moving between two or more languages within a conversation or a single sentence. Speech recognizers built around one language often misread the switched words, so mixed speech is harder to dictate than speech in one language.
- DiacriticsDiacritics are marks added to a letter, such as the acute accent in é, the tilde in ñ or the vowel marks in Arabic, that change how a letter sounds or which word it spells. Speech tools and everyday writers often leave them out, so a dictated word can come out spelled differently from what you meant.
- DialectA dialect is a regional or social variety of a language, with its own vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Speech recognition is usually less accurate on dialects than on the standard form, because labeled training data for dialects is often scarcer.
- Input method editor (IME)An input method editor (IME) is software that supports text input for characters that cannot be typed easily on a standard keyboard, such as many East Asian characters. Speech input can also be an input method, and Android allows only one input method to be enabled at a time.
- LocaleA locale is a language combined with a region, and sometimes a script, such as en-GB for English as used in the United Kingdom. Dictation and speech settings use locales because the same language can differ in spelling, punctuation and speech patterns from one region to another.
- Low-resource languageA low-resource language is one with little digital speech and text data for training speech recognition and other language tools. There is no fixed cutoff, and a language can be well resourced for one task and poorly resourced for another.
- Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), also called Fusha, is the standardized form of Arabic used in writing and formal speech, such as news broadcasts and official documents. Speakers use regional dialects in everyday conversation, and speech tools recognize formal Arabic more accurately than dialect speech.
- Non-native speechNon-native speech is speech in a language that is not the speaker's first language, often called L2 speech or foreign-accented speech. Recognizers can transcribe read non-native English well, but they handle hesitations, repetitions and revisions differently, and results depend on the system.
- Right-to-left (RTL) scriptA right-to-left (RTL) script is a writing system, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Urdu, whose letters run from right to left. Text that mixes these letters with digits or Latin words is bidirectional, so software needs a specific algorithm to order and display it.
- Speech translationSpeech translation converts speech in one language into the same meaning in another language, as text or as synthesized speech. Most systems first recognize the speech and then translate the text, so a recognition error carries into the translation.