Xu is a relatively new method of pronouncing Chinese characters. It is used in China and in places where there are large populations of Chinese speakers such as Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and Indonesia. It was developed by the Chinese government in 1984 with the intention of making it easier for non-Chinese speakers to learn Chinese characters.

Xu uses a modified version of the Pinyin system that is used in mainland China. This system uses tones and letters to represent the sounds made by each syllable in a word.

The advantage of xu over pinyin is that it allows you to pronounce words more accurately according to their native language’s phonetic rules. For example, if you’re familiar with Spanish or French, you’ll find that xu allows you to pronounce words like “shui” (water) correctly as ‘shu’ instead of ‘su’, which is what we would expect if we were pronouncing these words according to their Latin roots instead of their Chinese counterparts.

Last modified: September 7, 2022