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Brief Introduction to Romanized spelling system of Chinese - Pinyin
The phonological system of the modern standard language in Chinese, Putonghua or Guoyu, can be represented by letters. Of all the letters of English alphabet, 25 letters are used for Pinyin. Letter 'v' is not used, while letter 'ü' is added to represent the vowel sound 'yu'.
Consonant letters
There are 20 consonant letters
use in Putonghua. Letter 'V' is not used. Three consonants are represented by
combinations of two letters - 'zh', 'ch' and 'sh':
Note:
Vowel letters
There are 6 vowel letters used
in Putonghua:
Tones
There are four tones in
Putonghua: the 1st tone, the 2nd tone, the 3rd tone and the 4th tone. They are
superimposed over the main vowel of a syllable and represented by diacritic markers.
Syllables
Syllables are composed by consonants, vowels and tone.
According to the trational notation, a syllable is composed by a 'initial' and a 'final'. An initial is the first sound of
a syllable, usually, a consonant. A final is the rest part of the syllable. The
final can be a single vowel, or a combination of vowels, or combination of
vowels and nasals 'n' or 'ng': For example: (the following syllables are not
human voice, they are produced by Bell-lab automatic speech synthecizing
program)
Single
vowel |
|
Combination
of vowels |
|
Combination
of a vowel and a nasal |
|
Combination
of vowels and a nasal |
|
Combination
of consonant and a vowel |
wǒ, nǐ, tā |
Combination
of consonant, vowel and consonant |
nín, lán, mén, lín |
Other
possible combinations |
nóng, zhōng, chuān |
For more detailed introduction to Chinese pronunciation and Romanization click here.
For more resources on Chinese pronunciation click here.