General Chinese
Traditional characters 趙 元 任 Notes
General Chinese dhyao qiuan remm
Mandarin ( MSC ) jaw yuan renn ( GR )
Mandarin ( MSC ) zhào yuán rèn ( Pinyin )
Yuè ( Cantonese ) jiuh yùhn yahm ( Yale )
Yuè ( Cantonese ) ziu6 jyun4 jam6 ( Jyutping )
Mǐnnán ( Taiwanese ) tiō gôan jīm ( POJ )
Wu ( Shanghainese ) ( d ) zau* gnioe gnin ( Ghoqdaon , Vernacular )
Wu ( Shanghainese ) ( d ) zau yoe zen ( Ghoqdaon and Yahwe , Literary )
Wu ( Shanghainese ) ( d ) zau nyoe nyin ( Yahwe , Vernacular )
Japanese , go'on reading deu gwan nin Historical kana orthography
Japanese , go'on reading jō gan nin Modern kana usage
Japanese , kan'on reading teu gen jin Historical kana orthography
Japanese , kan'on reading chō gen jin Modern kana usage
Korean cho wŏn im ( McCune-Reischauer )
Korean jo won yim ( Revised Romanization )
Vietnamese triệu nguyên nhiệm ( Chữ quốc ngữ )
Romanized General Chinese
The digraphs are not reliably featural ; for example , the digraphs for the voiced stops do not all follow the same pattern . This is because Chao ran frequency tests , and used single letters for the most common consonants and vowels , while restricting digraphs and trigraphs to the more infrequent ones . Overall , syllables in the texts he transliterated averaged under 3​1⁄2 letters apiece . An example of Romanized General Chinese can be illustrated with Chao 's name :
General Chinese () is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published. It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese. General Chinese is not specifically a romanization system, but two alternative systems: one (Tung-dzih Xonn-dzih) uses Chinese characters phonetically, as a syllabary of 2082 glyphs, and the other (Tung-dzih Lo-maa-dzih) is an alphabetic romanization system with similar sound values and tone spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh.