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Pinyin
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Pinyin is a Roman-letter based system that China now uses to mark the pronunciation of Chinese characters. With four tones and pinyin, any Chinese characters can be pronounced precisely. In many cases, Pinyin is quite intuitive to English speakers with only a few exceptions. However, it can be a twist to render Pinyin in four tones for people who just start. Pinyin is made up of 2 tables: vowel table and consonant table, the latter of which will be discussed in consonant.
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Pinyin is the name of a romanized form of the Chinese written language. The Pinyin writing system was created by the government of the Peoples' Republic of China to aid in the study of Chinese. It is the most common form of romanized Chinese used throughout the world. Pinyin is essentially a phonetic Roman alphabet, used in dictionaries and Chinese language textbooks. In addition, the mastery of the Pinyin system makes Chinese word-processing much easier.
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Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin. The way these letters represent sounds in Standard Mandarin do not correspond to any other one particular language that uses the Roman alphabet. For example, the sounds indicated in pinyin by b and g correspond more closely to the sounds indicated by p and k in some Western uses of the Latin script, e.g., French. Other letters, like j, q, x or zh, indicate sounds that do not correspond to any exact sound in English. Some of the transcriptions in pinyin, such as the ian ending, do not correspond to English pronunciations, either. This means that people who have not studied Chinese, or who have studied Chinese but not the pinyin system, are likely to severely mispronounce some words if they attempt to pronounce pinyin according to their own language spellings.
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Pinyin (拼音 Pin1 Yin1) literally means "spelling according to sounds" in Mandarin. It is a system of romanization (phonetic notation and transliteration) for the Mandarin dialect used in the People's Republic of China (approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by its govenment). It superseded older transcriptions like the Wade-Giles system (1859; modified 1912) or Bopomofo or Zhuyin. Since then, Pinyin has been accepted by most international institutions as [T]he transcription system for Mandarin. The Republic of China (Taiwan)... didn't take it over due to political reasons and continued to use the Yale transcription.
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Pinyin was developed in the 1950’s in Mainland China and is now the official Romanization system of China, Singapore, the US Library of Congress, and the American Library Association. Library standards allow for easier access to documents by making it easier to locate Chinese language materials. A worldwide standard ... facilitates the exchange of data between institutions in various countries.
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This introductory lesson to Mandarin Pinyin pronunciation is divided into 7 parts and click the following links (in blue) to start. The materials for practice are available on the CDROM, For more information on Pinyin please visit the Wikipedia website.
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