Question
How do I get into Yale?
Answer
Mandarin Yale was developed to prepare American soldiers to communicate with their Chinese allies on the battlefield. Rather than try to teach recruits to interpret the standard romanization of the time, the Wade-Giles system, a new system was invented that utilized the decoding skills that recruits would already know from having learned to read English. It avoided the main problems that the Wade-Giles system presented to the uninitiated student or news announcer trying to get somebody's name right in a public forum, because it did not use the "rough breathing mark" (which looks like an apostrophe) to distinguish between sounds like gee and chee(se). In Wade-Giles the first of those would be written chi and the second would be written ch'i. In the Yale romanization they would be written ji and chi. The Yale system also avoids the difficulties faced by the beginner trying to read pinyin romanization because it uses certain Roman letters and combinations of letters in such a way that they no longer carry their expected values. For instance, q in pinyin is pronounced something like the ch in chicken and is written as ch in Yale Romanization. Xi in pinyin is pronounced something like the sh in sheep, but in Yale it is written as syi. Zhi in pinyin sounds something like the ger in gerbil, and is written as jr in Yale romanization. In Wade-Giles, "knowledge" (知识) is chih-shih, in pinyin, zhishi, but in Yale romanization it is written jr-shr. Only the latter will elicit a near-correct pronunciation from an unprepared English speaker.
— Source: Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)