How to Learn Chinese Alphabet Online
Chinese Alphabet, known as ‘Pīnyīn’ in Chinese, is the very essential step to start Chinese learning. Although it’s as same as English letters in writing, the pronunciation between them are quite different. This article lists the tips to help you learn it!To get more news about chinese alphabet for beginners, you can visit shine news official website.
When we start to learn a language, we usually begin with an alphabet. However, given that Chinese is written in characters, which are pictographs and not individual letters that make up words, pinyin is the system that transposes characters into words.
One of the main differences between Chinese and English, for example, is that Chinese is a tonal language, with “initials,” “finals” and “tones” that form words. In the word ”pīnyīn,” for example, pīn begin with the initial “p,” and the final “in” and uses the level tone “-.”
There are 23 initials, 24 finals and 5 tones in Chinese. An initial followed by a final can make up a complete syllable – spoken with a tone. For most Mandarin learners, the challenge is learning the different tones to correctly pronounce the word.
Tones give Mandarin a very distinctive quality, but it could also be a source of miscommunication if one pronounces them incorrectly. From my experience in talking with foreigners in Chinese, most haven’t paid enough attention to the tones, thus sometimes I can’t understand what they say.
After understanding the pronunciation of the tones, here comes another question: how to mark the tones? Most of time we place the tone mark above the first initial. However, whenever there are two initials that start with “i,” “u,”or “ü,”’ we mark the tone above the second initial.
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