What you see is pinyin, literally 'spell out the sound'. It's a system for romanizing Chinese ideograms, used in mainland China for Mandarin, a.k.a. putonghua.

Readers Say Readers judge Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Jimmy Fallon’s Mass. town pronunciations A majority of respondents said their hometown passed the test — but Quincy (and a few other classics) ...

Did 17th-century immigrants to the 13 colonies have modern British accents? First, we need to figure out what a “British accent” is. Accents are pretty complicated things. Linguistically speaking, the ...

The English language is full of words that seem overstuffed with unnecessary letters, feel like they should be spelled a different way, or just don't make sense. Here are some of our favorites, ...