<p>Chinese can be sorted by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Pinyin</a>. This is also what is done in the dictionary. Basically, each character has a prononciation, and that prononciation can be latinized into Pinyin. You can look up Pinyin on Wiktionary. The first letter of Pinyin can be used to group the phrases in your glossary.</p>

<p>For example, word "苹果" has Pinyin "píng guǒ" according to <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%98%8B%E6%9E%9C#Chinese" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>. You can sort the word on Pinyin just like English words, with an additional rule of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Tones" rel="nofollow noreferrer">tone</a>. If a letter in Pinyin has a tone, sort tone in the order of "ā, á, ǎ, à". And toned vowels come prior to the untoned.</p>

<p>Note that, one Chinese character may have multiple prononciations, so you should search for the entire phase to determine the Pinyin for the characters.</p>

<p>Other sort schemes also exist, such as the radical order, or total strokes. But these are now less commonly used than Pinyin. Also keep in mind that, Chinese has a lot of accents, so Pinyin sorting may not be ideal if your audience is old  Cantonese who does not speak Mandarin, for example. In that case, total strokes might be a better solution. Another side note, Taiwan is also using Pinyin as their official Latinization system. So Pinyin can be generally used for both Mainland and Taiwan audience.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-25T07:17:59.800Z
Thanks Harry for information. Currently, for english the approach is lets say I have  titles as Aeroplane, Apple, Aqua in this sequence. So, when user clicks on 'A' alphabet, it gets auto scrolls to Aeroplane because alphabet 'A' matches to title[0] - A in Aeroplane. Can you please help me how can this be done for Chinese as this approach would fail for Chinese and I want to have generalised approach.
Barbara
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-25T07:29:30.260Z
If you want to do this in a program. I think you have two choices. First, directly use the first Chinese character as the glossary title. However, this is only feasible if you don't have a large number of Chinese characters in the first position. Second, you should store Pinyin, or at least the first letter of Pinyin, along with the glossary item in your database. You could name it sort_key or something, and for English just store the word itself. Then, you can have a generalized approach by jumping to the first sort_key that matches your glossary title.
Harry Summer
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-25T08:25:26.183Z
OK.. I will check which approach I can go with. Thank you very much Harry for the information.
Barbara
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-25T07:07:59.363Z
2018-10-25T07:19:51.067Z
2018-10-25T07:19:51.067Z
Harry Summer
<p>I am implementing multilingual glossary where we have alphabets and glossary content having title and description. Currently it is in english and I want to add support for Chinese. 
In English I have alphabets like A, B, C, D, etc. On click of any of the alphabets the corresponding title gets displayed.
How do we implement the same for Chinese?</p>

<translation><simplified-characters>
Glossary Implementation
# Glossary Implementation

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-10-25)

I am implementing multilingual glossary where we have alphabets and glossary content having title and description. Currently it is in english and I want to add support for Chinese.
In English I have alphabets like A, B, C, D, etc. On click of any of the alphabets the corresponding title gets displayed.
How do we implement the same for Chinese?

**Tags:** translation, simplified-characters

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2018-10-25. Score: 1

Chinese can be sorted by [Pinyin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin). This is also what is done in the dictionary. Basically, each character has a prononciation, and that prononciation can be latinized into Pinyin. You can look up Pinyin on Wiktionary. The first letter of Pinyin can be used to group the phrases in your glossary.

For example, word "苹果" has Pinyin "píng guǒ" according to [here](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%98%8B%E6%9E%9C#Chinese). You can sort the word on Pinyin just like English words, with an additional rule of the [tone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Tones). If a letter in Pinyin has a tone, sort tone in the order of "ā, á, ǎ, à". And toned vowels come prior to the untoned.

Note that, one Chinese character may have multiple prononciations, so you should search for the entire phase to determine the Pinyin for the characters.

Other sort schemes also exist, such as the radical order, or total strokes. But these are now less commonly used than Pinyin. Also keep in mind that, Chinese has a lot of accents, so Pinyin sorting may not be ideal if your audience is old Cantonese who does not speak Mandarin, for example. In that case, total strokes might be a better solution. Another side note, Taiwan is also using Pinyin as their official Latinization system. So Pinyin can be generally used for both Mainland and Taiwan audience.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Thanks Harry for information. Currently, for english the approach is lets say I have  titles as Aeroplane, Apple, Aqua in this sequence. So, when user clicks on 'A' alphabet, it gets auto scrolls to Aeroplane because alphabet 'A' matches to title[0] - A in Aeroplane. Can you please help me how can this be done for Chinese as this approach would fail for Chinese and I want to have generalised approach.  
> **username_1**: If you want to do this in a program. I think you have two choices. First, directly use the first Chinese character as the glossary title. However, this is only feasible if you don't have a large number of Chinese characters in the first position. Second, you should store Pinyin, or at least the first letter of Pinyin, along with the glossary item in your database. You could name it sort_key or something, and for English just store the word itself. Then, you can have a generalized approach by jumping to the first sort_key that matches your glossary title.  
> **username_0**: OK.. I will check which approach I can go with. Thank you very much Harry for the information.  

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