Chinese checkers finishers. The rules are simple, so even young children can play. Despite its name, the game is not a variation of checkers, nor did it originate in China or any part of Asia (whereas the game 象棋 "xiangqi", or "Chinese chess", is from China). The game was invented in Germany in 1892 under the name "Stern-Halma" as a variation of the older American game Halma. The "Stern" (German for "star") refers to the board's star shape (in contrast to the square board used in Halma). The name "Chinese Checkers" originated in the United States as a marketing scheme by Bill
Transliteration of Chinese Transliteration of Chinese The different varieties of Chinese have been transcribed into many other writing systems. General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese. General Chinese is not specifically a romanisation system, but two alternative systems. One uses Chinese characters phonetically, as a syllabary of 2082