Chinese Pronunciation: The Ultimate Introduction to Chinese Pinyin
Pronunciation is an essential piece for you to ace your Chinese. To quickly get familiar with this language, you need to really focus on the fundamentals of Chinese pronunciation, which is widely known as Chinese pinyin.
Regardless of your level, ensuring the accuracy of your Chinese pronunciation is certainly crucial. For language learning, a decent start is a large portion of the journey. This blog helps you learn Chinese pronunciation more easily and effectively in a right manner.
What is Pinyin?
Mandarin Chinese is not a phonetic language. Chinese pronunciation cannot be identified with how Chinese characters look. Chinese Pinyin is a unique framework made for Chinese learners to learn Chinese pronunciation. Chinese pinyin specifies the pronunciation of Chinese characters and can be a very useful method to input Chinese characters into digital devices.
Chinese Pinyin looks almost the same as English letters. A person would be able to pronounce every Chinese character using pinyin. Nevertheless, each learner has to understand that Chinese pronunciation through the use of Chinese pinyin is certainly different from English pronunciation. The sound belonging to each pinyin letter might be different from the sound of that letter in English. Chinese learners cannot just pronounce pinyin as though it were the English language.
Each Chinese pinyin syllable has three parts: initial, final and tone. Most of the difficult pinyin sounds are initials, like zh/ch/sh, z/c/s, j/q/x and r. There are some difficult pinyin finals as well, such as ü.
What is Tones?
Chinese is a tonal language, implying that how a sound is pronounced in terms of tone strictly decides the meaning of the word. Tones make Chinese a very special language, however, they can lead to a lot of miscommunication in case of careless mistakes.
Chinese pronunciation has four primary tones and one neutral tone. Each of them has a distinctive pitch contour following the Chinese 5-level system as below.
Tips to conquer your Chinese pronunciation
1. Ace the fundamental rules of Chinese pinyin and tones
Learning basic sentences like “你好”， “谢谢” in Chinese is not hard, however, progressing past the simple greetings requires much more efforts. The most essential requirement for a Chinese beginner is to get used to Chinese pinyin, its spelling and tone sandhi rules. It is advisable for beginners to look for an experienced language educator who speaks standard Chinese to help clarify and practice the distinctions between similarly sounding pairs.
There are also other blogs sharing about tips to ace Chinese pronunciation. In terms of tones, other than the normal tone practices, there are a few students sharing strategies like acing Chinese pronunciation without relying on tone marks.
2. Learn the language in phrases and sentences
Never simply learn the individual characters. It is important to practice the tones in an actual speech. At the point when a person starts to learn Chinese pronunciation, practicing pairs of tones brings a lot of benefits. Just start with some simple words you have known very well such as 你好. This expression has a second tone followed by a third one. Practice this for a few times and tune in for the tone and rhythm of the syllables. Learning this common rhythm of Chinese pronunciation would assist you with future encounters of new words. Furthermore, it helps you with the smoothness of your speech. The learning journey is obviously intense at the beginning, yet it will gradually become more natural and enjoyable when you progress further.
Chinese Learning Hub
1. Recorded Lessons
a) Tsinghua Chinese: Start Talking with 1.3 Billion People: This beginner Chinese course is taught by Tsinghua University to learn Chinese pinyin, general rules for Chinese pronunciation and basic Chinese vocabulary.
b) Fluent Forever: This series provide instructions to get basic knowledge about Chinese pronunciation, including Chinese pinyin, tones and spelling rules.
2. Mobile applications
a) Chinese English Pinyin Dictionary: A dictionary specially made for learning Chinese pronunciation.
b) trainchinese Dictionary and Flash Cards: This dictionary has been highly recommended for Chinese learners. Users can look up words by both Chinese characters or pinyin version. The app also has a premium functionality add-on which provides audio pronunciation.
For other apps for learning Chinese, this article might also help:
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