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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