You might recognise pinyin from your textbooks; they are the annotations above each Chinese character. The Hanyu Pinyin system has helped billions of people learn to read, write and speak Chinese.

more than a thousand Chinese name combinations could be created from this Hanyu pinyin, the system to transcribe Mandarin Chinese sounds into Latin alphabets used in mainland China. For instance ...

However, while it is mandatory for many students in Hong Kong to learn Hanyu Pinyin in Putonghua classes, Cantonese Pinyin is rarely used to learn pronunciations of Traditional Chinese.