Overview
Pinyin is a way to represent Chinese
characters and express the sounds in the Chinese language
using the alphabet. There are other systems
to express Mandarin, but Pinyin is the most accepted
and widely used. Once you learn Pinyin you will know
how to pronounce any word in Mandarin using a Chinese
dictionary. Pinyin is also the most common way to
input Chinese characters into a computer. Although
Pinyin and English both use the Roman alphabet, many
letters are not expressed with the same sounds that
English uses.
Initals and Finals
Words expressed in pinyin use a set of 21 sounds representing
the beginning of the word called initials, and a set
of 37 sounds representing the end of the word called
finals. These combine to form about 420 different
sounds.
Example:
The word for “Flower” expressed in pinyin
is: huā
In this word, the letter “h”
is the initial and “uā”
is the final.
Words are often combined to form compound words
The word for “China” expressed in pinyin
is: zhōngguó
zhōng means middle.
Initial: “zh”
Final: “ōng”
guó means country.
Initial: “g”
Final: “uó”
Tones
Words in Mandarin that have the same pronunciation
can have different meanings depending on how the word
is said. The "tone" of a word describes how
the the pitch of the speaker's voice changes as the
word is said. There are four "tones" in Mandarin
which we will cover in detail in the "Tones"
section. The tones are represented in pinyin by marks
above the words.
There are a number of spelling rules and exceptions
to rules that you will learn in these lessons.
