|
Pinyin or Hanyu Pinyin Introduction.
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.
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
Vowel
letters
There are 6 vowel
letters used in Mandarin:
a,
o, e, i, u, ü
Syllables
Syllables are
composed by consonants, vowels and tone.
The consonant that
begins a syllable is initial, 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 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.
Now, for a few
examples, let's practice some Finals!
|
