Chinese Braille Alphabet: Initials, Finals and Tones

The Chinese braille alphabet does not write Chinese characters. It writes Mandarin by sound, the way pinyin does: each syllable is an initial, a final and, when needed, a tone, one cell each. A syllable therefore takes one to three cells. 盲文 mángwén, the Chinese word for braille, is ⠍⠦⠒⠂: m ⠍, ang ⠦, wen ⠒ and the cell of the second tone, ⠂. Máng has no tone cell because of a rule of the 2018 scheme, explained below.

We wrote this page in English for teachers, learners of Mandarin and braille readers who want to know how another code works. The cells follow the National Common Braille Scheme (国家通用盲文方案), which China's Ministry of Education, its State Language Commission and the China Disabled Persons' Federation issued in 2018 (official document). We checked the cells against that document and against the English and Chinese Wikipedia articles. Its initials and finals are the same as those of the older system, known as Current Braille. Where the two differ, mainly in tones, we say so.

Key points

• Braille writes the sound, never the character. Words that sound alike look alike, as they do in pinyin.
• A syllable is up to three cells: initial, final and tone, in that order. A space goes between words, not between the syllables of a word.
• 18 cells for 21 initials. J, q and x share the cells of g, k and h, ⠛ ⠅ ⠓, because the final that follows tells which one is meant.
• 34 finals, one cell each, even long ones such as iang ⠭ or uang ⠶.
• Four tone cells: ⠁ (dot 1), ⠂ (dot 2), ⠄ (dot 3) and ⠆ (dots 2-3). The neutral tone has none.
• In the 2018 scheme every initial leaves one tone unwritten, so a syllable without a tone cell still tells you its tone.
• Numbers use the number sign ⠼ (dots 3-4-5-6) and the cells of a to j, as in English braille. The same cell is also the final eng.

How a syllable is built

Pinyin splits every Mandarin syllable in two: the initial, the consonant at the start, and the final, everything after it. Zhōng is zh + ong, and mán is m + an. Chinese braille gives each part a cell and adds a third for the tone, in the same six-dot cell as English braille: dots 1, 2 and 3 down the left column, 4, 5 and 6 down the right.

The official scheme illustrates this with 中 zhōng, "middle": ⠌ for zh, ⠲ for ong and ⠁ for the first tone, so ⠌⠲⠁.

Some syllables are shorter:

• No initial. A syllable such as yóu is a final on its own, plus its tone: 由 yóu is ⠳⠂. Pinyin's y and w are spelling devices, and braille has no cell for them.
• No final. In zhi, chi, shi, ri, zi, ci and si, the i is not written. 知 zhī is ⠌⠁, the initial and the tone, an example taken from the official scheme.
• No tone. The neutral tone has no cell, and the 2018 rules leave some tones out. We come back to this below.

Words are the unit of writing: the syllables of one word are joined, and a space goes between words. Both Wikipedias give the rule, and the Chinese one cites it from the official scheme.

Initials: 18 cells for 21 sounds

Most initials keep the international value of the letter, the one an English braille reader already knows. The English Wikipedia explains the others: ch takes ⠟, its value in Russian braille, sh takes ⠱, a common value in international braille, and r takes ⠚, the j of English braille, because the old Wade–Giles romanization wrote that sound with a j.

Why j, q, x need no cells of their own. In Mandarin, j, q and x only come before an i or ü sound, and g, k and h never do. The final settles which one is meant, so braille writes j, q, x with the cells of g, k, h: ⠛⠥ is gu, and ⠛⠬ is ju. Keep in mind that a shared cell is not a shared initial: h and x both use ⠓, but, as you will see in the tone rules, they leave out different tones.

Finals: 34 cells

A final is everything after the initial: a vowel, a pair of vowels, or a vowel with n or ng. Each final is a single cell, so iang takes one cell, not four. When a final has no initial in front of it, pinyin spells it with a y or a w, shown in the second column. Braille writes the same cell either way.

Finals with a, e and o:

Pinyin's e and o share one cell, the Chinese Wikipedia notes.

Finals with i:

Finals with u:

Finals with ü:

Three spelling habits of pinyin do not carry over, because braille follows the sound:

1. The i of zhi, chi, shi, ri, zi, ci and si is not written. Those seven syllables are the initial alone, plus the tone when it is written: 时 shí is ⠱⠂. Wikipedia notes that bopomofo, the phonetic script used in Taiwan, does the same.
2. After j, q and x, pinyin's u is ü. Pinyin drops the two dots there; braille writes the ü final. 权 quán is ⠅⠯ and 宣 xuān is ⠓⠯⠁, both with the final üan.
3. Pinyin's short spellings iu, ui and un are the full finals iou, uei and uen. 尊 zūn is ⠵⠒⠁, with the cell of wen, and 对 duì is ⠙⠺, with the cell of wei.

Several finals keep an international vowel value, Wikipedia points out: ⠊ yi is i in English braille, ⠥ wu is u, and ⠕ wo is o. The rest are new.

Tones: four cells after the final

Mandarin has four tones and a neutral tone. The tone cell, when there is one, is the last cell of the syllable, right after the final.

The first three tones are dots 1, 2 and 3, down the left column. The fourth is dots 2 and 3 together.

What changes between systems is when the tone is written.

Current Braille: only when needed

In the system rolled out across China in 1953, Current Braille (现行盲文), the tone is written sparingly, where a word could otherwise be misread, according to the English Wikipedia. That keeps texts short, and it was also the system's best-known weakness. A 2014 article by the China News Service describes its tone marking as arbitrary and gives an example: without tones, and without context, a reader cannot tell apart 时间 shíjiān "time", 事件 shìjiàn "event" and 实践 shíjiàn "practice". With no tone cells, all three are ⠱⠛⠩.

The 2018 scheme: every tone, fewer cells

The National Common Braille Scheme starts from the opposite end: every syllable has its tone. Then, to save space, it leaves out one tone for each initial, in four groups. The Chinese Wikipedia lists the rules from the official scheme, and we checked them against the document itself:

Each of the 21 initials is in exactly one group. That gives the reading rule: a syllable with no tone cell has the tone its initial leaves out, or the neutral tone, which is never written.

The exceptions exist because of that second case. Tóu, lè and zì keep their tone so that they are not mistaken for the neutral-tone 头 tou, 了 le and 子 zi, very common in everyday Chinese. The Chinese Wikipedia cites this reason from the scheme's development report.

Five frequent syllables without an initial go the other way and drop their tone even though it is not the fourth: yī, ér, wǒ, yě and yǒu, the sounds of words such as 一 "one", 而 "and", 我 "I", 也 "also" and 有 "to have". The scheme also lets a writer keep a tone the rules would leave out, where the meaning needs it.

Here are the three words from the China News Service example, written in the 2018 scheme:

Sh and j both leave out the fourth tone, so shì and jiàn need no tone cell, while shí and jiān keep theirs. The three words now look different. The first one, ⠱⠂⠛⠩⠁, is also how the English Wikipedia writes 时间 with full tones.

Worked examples

Both examples follow the 2018 scheme.

盲文 mángwén, "braille"

The word is ⠍⠦⠒⠂, four cells with no space, as in the infobox of the Chinese Wikipedia article. With every tone written out, it would be ⠍⠦⠂⠒⠂.

A sentence: 人人生而自由

The first words of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "All human beings are born free", as the Chinese Wikipedia transcribes them:

⠚⠴⠚⠴ ⠱⠼⠁ ⠗ ⠵⠆⠳⠂

Notice that 自 zì is just the initial z and the tone: the i is not written.

Short forms: 的 and 他

A few very common words have a shorter spelling in the 2018 scheme. The common particle 的 de is its initial alone, ⠙, instead of ⠙⠢. The pronoun 他 tā, "he", is ⠞. The official document lists these and a few more, and the Chinese Wikipedia's sample text shows both: 他们 tāmen, "they", is ⠞⠍⠴. According to the English Wikipedia, Current Braille also wrote de as ⠙, although not every text does.

Numbers and punctuation

Numbers work as in English braille: the number sign ⠼ (dots 3-4-5-6), then the cells of the letters a to j for 1 to 0. One sign covers every digit after it, so 2018 is ⠼⠃⠚⠁⠓. For how numbers work in English braille, see braille numbers.

The same cell has a second job. In 平等 píngděng, "equal", also from the Declaration's first article, ⠏⠡⠙⠼⠄, the ⠼ comes right after the initial ⠙ d, where only a final can stand: there it is eng.

The main punctuation marks in the 2018 scheme, from the Chinese Wikipedia and the official document:

Charts of Current Braille give different cells for some marks, such as the enumeration comma, so check which scheme a text follows. For English punctuation, see braille punctuation.

Current Braille, GB/T 15720 and the 2018 scheme

Current Braille. In 1952, Huang Nai (黄乃), who was blind and was the son of the revolutionary Huang Xing, proposed a New Braille Scheme (新盲字方案). It was based on Mandarin with Beijing pronunciation, written word by word, and built on older Chinese braille systems such as 心目克明. It was rolled out across the country in 1953, giving China a single braille for the first time, with 18 initials, 34 finals and a separate cell for the tone, the China News Service recounts. That is the system known as Current Braille, 现行盲文 xiànxíng mángwén; the Chinese Wikipedia also dates its nationwide rollout to 1953.

GB/T 15720. Its cells were later set down in a national standard, GB/T 15720, Chinese Braille (中国盲文). The English Wikipedia cites the 2008 edition of that standard as a source for its chart.

The 2018 scheme. The National Common Braille Scheme, standard GF 0019-2018, was issued on March 9, 2018 and took effect on July 1, 2018. It was published jointly by the Ministry of Education, the State Language Commission and the China Disabled Persons' Federation, and the English title printed on the document is Chinese Common Braille Scheme. It keeps the initials and finals of Current Braille and changes, above all, how tones are written, with the rules above. Its name in its own braille, 国家通用盲文, is ⠛⠕⠂⠛⠫⠁ ⠞⠲⠁⠹ ⠍⠦⠒⠂. We could not verify how far it has replaced Current Braille in schools and books.

Other Chinese braille systems

The charts above are for Mandarin in mainland China. They are not the only Chinese braille:

• Two-cell Chinese braille (汉语双拼盲文). Work on it began in 1975, according to the China News Service, and the State Language Commission approved it for trial use in 1988, according to the Chinese Wikipedia. Every syllable is exactly two cells: the first holds the initial and the medial vowel, the second the rest of the final and the tone (Wikipedia). Both sources say Current Braille is still the more widely used of the two in the mainland.
• Taiwanese braille, used in Taiwan for Mandarin. It is organized around zhuyin, also called bopomofo, the phonetic script taught in Taiwan, and, unlike mainland braille, most of its consonants do not keep their international braille values. It pairs j, q, x with g, c, s rather than with g, k, h, and, according to Wikipedia, it always writes the tone, even on neutral-tone syllables.
• Cantonese braille, used in Hong Kong and Macau. It also splits each syllable into initial, rime and tone, but for Cantonese sounds, and it leaves the high tone unwritten (Wikipedia).

For how Chinese compares with Japanese, Korean, Arabic and the Latin-based codes, see braille in other languages, and for the other big East Asian system, our page on Japanese braille.

Chinese braille and English braille side by side

Try it and learn it

• See the cells Chinese borrows from the Latin alphabet on our English braille alphabet page. The initials b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, z, c and s are the same cells as those English letters.
• To compare with English, type a word into the English braille translator. It converts English, not Chinese.
• To learn braille in an app: Braillito does not teach Chinese braille. If you want to start with the cell itself, Braillito teaches it on iPhone and Android (the links are below). Its English course has 59 lessons of uncontracted braille in 8 worlds, built from exercises, with lives, levels and a daily streak, and the app also teaches the braille of 37 other languages, Japanese and Korean among them. It is a subscription with no free version: depending on the plan, first-time subscribers get a free trial or a cheaper first period (how the subscription works).

Frequently asked questions

Is Chinese braille based on characters?

No. Standard Chinese braille writes the sound of each syllable, the way pinyin does, and never the character. Words that sound the same, such as the many characters read shì, are written the same, and readers tell them apart from context and, in the 2018 scheme, from the tone.

How many symbols does the Chinese braille alphabet have?

Strictly speaking it is not an alphabet but a set of syllable parts: 18 cells for the 21 initials, 34 for the finals and 4 for the tones, 56 different cells in all. Numbers and punctuation reuse some of them in other combinations.

How do you write "China" in Chinese braille?

中国 Zhōngguó is one word: ⠌⠲⠁⠛⠕⠂. That is zh + ong + 1st tone, then g + uo + 2nd tone. Both tones are written, because zh and g only leave out the 4th.

Is Chinese braille the same as English braille?

No. Both use the same six-dot cell and the same numbers, but in Chinese a cell is part of a syllable, not a letter. ⠁ is a in English and the first tone in Chinese, and ⠑, e in English, is the final ie. Many initials do match English letters, which helps an English braille reader get started.

How is braille in Taiwan different?

Taiwan uses Taiwanese braille, which is organized around zhuyin rather than pinyin, gives most consonants cells that differ from their international values and writes every tone. The charts on this page are for mainland China and do not apply to it.