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Chinese Pinyin or Hanyu Pinyin Overview
Chinese Pinyin is the romanization of the Chinese "written
sound". Romanization approximates Mandarin pronunciation with
Western spellings and includes a tone mark to signify the pitch
of a word.
Just like alphabet A - Z to English, Pinyin provides a
phonetic alphabet for Chinese and is taught from Grade 1 in
Chinese elementary schools. It is a fundamental tool used for
learning the spelling of Chinese characters throughout Chinese
language study.
Pinyin is used by most modern Chinese dictionaries to denote
pronunciation of characters. It is also an efficient input method
in Chinese computer software, which is natively supported by
Microsoft Windows OS.
After mastering Pinyin, you can easily read Chinese books with
Pinyin marked, learn Chinese characters by looking in the
dictionary, or input Chinese characters into your computer, it
will take your Chinese study to a higher level.
25 out of 26 English alphabet letters are used in Pinyin.
Letter 'v' is not used, while letter ' ü ' is added to
represent the vowel sound of 'yu'.
Pinyin includes consonants and vowel letters.
1. Consonant letters
There are 20 consonant letters use in Mandarin (three
consonants are represented by combinations of two letters - 'zh',
'ch' and 'sh'), they are:
b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh,
r, y, w
2. Vowel letters
There are 6 vowel letters used in Mandarin:
a, o, e, i, u, ü
3. Syllables
Syllables are composed by consonants, vowels and tone.
The consonant that begins a syllable is initial (listen to the
pronunciation in mp3 format online at
http://www.learn-chinese-language-online.com/chinese-pinyin-initials.html)
, they can be:
b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh,
r, y, w
The rest parts after the initial are finals. Final ( listen to
the pronunciation in mp3 format online at
http://www.learn-chinese-language-online.com/chinese-pinyin-finals.html
) can be a single vowel, a combination of vowels, or combination
of vowels and nasals 'n' or 'ng':
There are 6 simple finals which are single vowels, they are :
a, o, e, i, u, ü .
The others are compound finals, they are:
ai, ao, ou, ei, ia, ie, iao, iou, ua, uo, uai, uei,
üe,
an, ang, ong, en, eng, in, ing, ian, iang, iong, uen, ueng,
uan, uang, ün, üan
The combination of 21 initials and 33 finals in Mandarin
romanization (there are five more finals, but they share the same
symbols as other finals) form about 420 different sounds.
A word consists of initial + final + tone. In some cases, the
initial can be omitted.
Although most of the sounds are generally close to how they
are used and pronounced in English, some don't follow English
letters exactly and are pronounced differently.
Pay extra attention to the differences and listen closely to
each Chinese sound, it takes practices to pronounce
correctly.
Rosie From Learn Chinese Language Online (http://www.learn-chinese-language-online.com)
The goal of Learn Chinese Language Online (LCLO) is to reduce
the Mandarin Learning curve, promote and introduce the most
efficient way to grasp the broad foundation of Chinese
language.
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