The Chinese proper names in this book are transliterated in Pinyin, the most widely accepted method of romanization for Chinese. In actual usage, Chinese phonetics are so complex that a detailed treatment of Chinese pronunciation is outside the scope of this book. For the comfort and ease of the reader, however, it is useful to note a few letters that are commonly used in Pinyin spelling but are relatively uncommon in English and are given different values.
There are five consonants that are typically found to cause problems because of their special usage: c, q, x, z and zh. The following chart represent rough equivalents to these consonants in English:
c resembles ts
q resembles ch
x resembles sh
z resembles dz
zh resembles j