"Hanyu Pinyin"

In fact, ancient Chinese education also included pinyin instruction, but at the time, the Latin alphabet had not yet become widespread, so they used either direct annotation or the fanqie method.

The difference between this method of notation and modern Hanyu Pinyin was that students first had to memorize common characters by rote, then use those familiar characters to annotate the pronunciation of unfamiliar ones. Ancient elementary education consisted of texts such as the Three Character Classic and the Thousand Character Classic. Once students had memorized all of those, they could use the characters in them to annotate the pronunciation of new characters and learn them.

Put simply, the process was to learn characters first, then pinyin. Modern Hanyu Pinyin instruction worked in exactly the opposite way: students learned pinyin first, then used it to learn new characters.

In ancient pinyin instruction, the direct-annotation method was similar to how some modern students liked using Chinese characters to mark the pronunciation of English words. For example, they might annotate the English word for apple as "ai pao," and Mandarin orange as "ao run zhi."

Ancient Chinese worked the same way. When a student learned a new character, such as the yi in yisheng, "doctor," the teacher would tell him that it sounded the same as "yi," "one." When learning wu, "martial," he would be told that it sounded the same as "wu," "five."

But these were basically all single-syllable Chinese characters. When they encountered a character whose pronunciation consisted of two sounds, they had to use the fanqie method.

The fanqie method was similar to modern double pinyin. It was divided into an upper character and a lower character: the upper character represented the initial, while the lower character represented the final. For example, the character chang in changsheng, meaning "prosperous,"