Jianpu (简谱, “simplified notation”) writes music as numbers. It is the everyday notation of Chinese music — what erhu and dizi players actually read, what Chinese songbooks and conservatory folk-music materials are printed in, and one of the most learnable notation systems ever devised. If you can count to seven, you can start reading it today.
It descends from the French Galin-Paris-Chevé number system and became standard in China in the twentieth century. Here is the whole system, in reading order.
The digits: 1 to 7, plus 0
Each digit is a degree of the scale — a movable-do system:
| Digit | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solfège | do | re | mi | fa | sol | la | ti | rest |
1 is always the tonic, whatever the key. That's the quiet genius of jianpu: a melody looks identical in every key, so transposing is free — which is exactly why it suits instruments like the dizi, which is built in many keys.
The key signature: “1=D”
At the top of a piece you’ll see something like 1=D 2/4. It means: the tonic (1) is the pitch D, and the meter is 2/4. Change “1=D” to “1=G” and the same digits now sound a fourth higher. Nothing else on the page needs to change.
Octave dots
A dot above a digit raises it one octave; a dot below lowers it one octave. Two dots, two octaves. So a rising line through three octaves of the tonic is: 1 1 1 — 1 with a dot below, plain 1, 1 with a dot above.
Duration: underlines, dashes, and dots
A plain digit is one beat (a quarter note in most meters). From there:
| Written | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 5 | one beat (quarter) |
| 5 | half a beat (eighth) — one underline |
| 5 | quarter of a beat (sixteenth) — two underlines |
| 5 – | two beats (half note — each dash after a digit adds one beat) |
| 5 – – – | four beats (whole note) |
| 5· | dotted — the dot after a digit adds half its value |
| 0 | rest, with the same underline/dash rules |
Underlines group under beamed notes exactly the way beams group eighth notes on a staff, so rhythm reads at a glance. Sharps and flats are written as ♯ or ♭ before a digit; barlines and repeat signs work as in staff notation.
A worked example
The opening of Ode to Joy, in jianpu:
Reading it: the key is C, so 1 = C, which makes 3 = E. Bars one to three are plain one-beat notes: mi mi fa sol, sol fa mi re, do do re mi. The last bar is the famous rhythmic catch: 3· is a dotted quarter, the following 2 carries a single underline (an eighth note), and 2 – holds for two beats. Hum it — you already know exactly where that dotted rhythm lands.
That's the entire literacy barrier. Ten minutes with any Chinese songbook and the system is yours.
Why erhu and dizi players read it
Jianpu isn't a beginner's crutch that players graduate out of — it is the working notation of Chinese music, used from first lessons to the professional folk-orchestra stand. It fits the instruments: the erhu is taught, published, and performed from jianpu, and Erhu Studio renders it natively — numbered notation as the instrument actually uses it, not Western staff bolted on. The dizi comes in many keys, and jianpu’s movable 1 means one page serves them all.
Both apps grade your playing against that notation, per note, on-device: learn erhu · learn dizi. If you’re choosing between them, our honest difficulty ranking tells you what each one asks of a beginner.