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Chinese language has an ideographic and logographic writing system, and it has always been a difficult problem to correctly represent the phonology of Chinese characters (syllables and words). The Pinyin system uses Roman alphabets to spell the sounds of Chinese characters, but it was not designed as an accurate phonetic transcription system. The Pinyin system is simple and easy to learn, but its simplicity also causes the problem that many different phonemes have to be represented by the same letter. The phonetic transcription system widely accepted by linguists is the EPA (International Phonetic Alphabets), a system designed for transcribing the phonemes of the world ' s languages. To accurately capture Mandarin Chinese phonology, this study compares Pinyin symbols and EPA in describing Mandarin initials (consonant sounds) and finals (vowel sounds). At Sthe end, it is found out that both pinyin and EPA have advantages and disadvantages.
Keywords: phonology, mandarin, pinyin, EPA
INTRODUCTION
The population in China alone accounts for about 1.3 billion, approximately one-fifth of the total population of the human race. With such a high percentage of the human race growing up speaking different varieties of the language as their first language, Chinese is indisputably one of the most commonly used languages in the world. Against such a background, interest in the Chinese language has grown rapidly outside China. China is a unitary multinational state which officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups including Han, Zhuang, Uygur, Hui, Yi, Yibetan, Miao, Manchu, Mongol, Buyi, and Korea. Chinese, or zhongguoren, is used to refer all citizens in the People ' s Republic of China regardless of ethnic nationality. Apart from the Han majority, the non-Han Chinese, with a total of more than 96.5 million people, constitute roughly 8% of the total population in the People's Republic (Sun, 2006:2).
Chinese, as a language name in English, refers to the Sinitie subgroup of Sino-Tibetan languages in Asia. First of all, Chinese can be translated as zhongwen generally referring to the language. Zhongwen is also the right term to use for the academic discipline in studying Chinese language and literature, such as zhongwenxi for the Chinese department in a university setting. Second, the term hanyu ' Hanyu language ' is used in the context contrasting the languages spoken...