Nowadays, when we talk about Chinese alphabets, we mean the official Chinese romanization system Pinyin or Hanyu Pinyin 汉语拼音。

In history, people have used four major kinds of Chinese alphabetic transcription
Yale romanization of Mandarin
Wade-Giles
Romanization of Chinese in Taiwan – 通用拼音 ( They tried to be different from Hanyu Pinyin used in Mainland China)for some political reasons)
Hanyu Pinyin 汉语拼音 or just Pinyin which is the modern international standard for standard Chinese transcription.

So if you learned Pinyin, and someone asks you if you know Chinese alphabets, you would say “Of course”.

Let’s get started to learn some basic Pinyin 拼音