Overview
If you look at some Chinese newspaper or books, your may find out those Chinese characters are really difficult to read. Fortunately speaking and listening Chinese is much easier especially with the help of Pinyin. Pinyin is a way to represent Chinese characters and express the sounds in the Chinese language using the Latin alphabet.Once you know pinyin, you can pronounce any Chinese as long as you get the pinyin of the Characters. After the lesson, you will be able to pronounce Chinese correctly.
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Pronunciation
Pinyin is mainly used to teach standard Chinese pronunciation. A syllable in Chinese is composed of an initial, which is a consonant that begins the syllable, and a final, witch covers the rest of the syllable. Finals can be vowels or combination of vowels and consonant.
Tone
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 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 |
