although in pinyin, the name of the neighboring province to the west, "shaanxi", is spelled exactly the same as "shanxi", the only difference in how the two words are pronounced is that the first syllable in "shanxi" is said using the first tone in mandarin, while the first syllable in "shaanxi" is said with the third tone. since tone markers are not usually used to show how to pronounce the two different names, the first word in "shaanxi" is spelled using the gwoyeu romatzyh method instead, which indicates tones by adding extra letters to a syllable.