What are the Chinese equivalents for the English alphabet?
There really aren’t any. Chinese uses characters to represent the sounds of its language, with one character per syllable (and usually morpheme), as opposed to English which has a letter for each individual sound (more or less). There are approximately five to seven thousand Chinese characters in common use. So asking for the equivalent characters to the English alphabet is a meaningless question. Some systems do exist to transcribe the sounds of Chinese. The most popular of these, Hanyu pinyin, uses the same Latin alphabet as English. Another system, called the National Phonetic Symbols (or BoPoMoFo after the first four letters) and mostly used in Taiwan, does use unique Chinese symbols for the sounds of the Chinese language. However, it is mostly used only by students of the language and in dictionaries. Many Chinese even in Taiwan cannot read it. So I do not recommend trying to use it for anything, especially tattoos. More information on the National Phonetic Symbol system is availa
