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						Alphabet
					First of all. there is no alphabet in the Chinese language.  Even though there are 8 different dialects, or languages of China, the written language stays the same.  The early dynasty dictionary contained nearly 50,000 characters, but the late dynasty dictionary contained about 9,000 characters. An educated person could probably recognize about 6,000 characters.  Each letter or word in Chinese is actually a symbol.  However, there are many terms used to describe this: character, ideograph, pictograph, etc.  Each character is made up of strokes, line, or mark.  A stroke that is missing or in the wrong location could change the meaning of the character entirely.  Furthermore, each character is written in a certain sequence, and every character should be written in that order.  Unfortunately, since there is no general pattern in which to write each character, and that there is no alphabet, Chinese an extremely arduous language to learn.
				Pinyin:
			Since the early 1950s a system using the Latin alphabet, called Pinyin, has been developed in China, and it is now in common use.  Pinyin is a Chinese system for transliterating Mandarin Chinese with European characters.  For example, the name Chiang Kai-Shek and the word wonton are forms of Pinyin.  And with European characters, there is of course is an alphabet, usually referred to as "bopomofo".  The pronunciation of most of the letters is similar to pronunciation to the European counterparts, but with slight variations.  Pay special attention to the sounds that are not at all pronounced as you  would expect: "c", "j", "sh", "q", "r", "z" and "zh".  The central government is also expanding the use of the Pinyin romanization system and is urging citizens to learn this alphabetized system of writing Chinese words.  Remember, Pinyin is used only to specify the pronunciation of Chinese characters, not the meaning.
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