| In 1958, the Chinese offically adopted a system for wtiting their language using the Roman alphabet. This is known as “Pinyin”, meaning “write sound”. Pinyin uses either one or two letters from Roman alphabet to represent each sound in Mandarin. In China, you may see Pinyin next to the Chinese Characters on signs, shop-fronts or advertising billboards. There are two aspects of Chinese characters' pronunciation to learn about. 1. Phonics - Pinyin Invariably, each Chinese character's pronunciation is either a consonant followed by one or two vowels (always in this order) or one or two vowels only. In an analogy, Chinese characters all sound a bit like "La", "Di", "Da". And generally the pronunciation of each Chinese character lasts about the same length in a sentence. So roughly, a Chinese sentence sounds like "he saw me", "I know you", or "who can sing?", if read flatly. The phonics system for Chinese characters is called Pinyin. We will introduce Pinyin in much detail starting from Class 3. 2. Four Tones Each Chinese character has one vowel, and each vowel, in turn, has a tone with it. Many characters should have different tones for different meanings, but most have unique tones in all situations. There are 5 possible tones: 4 major tones and a "light" tone. Conventionally, the major tones are labeled as following. Tone 1: flat ma1 Mother Tone 2: up tang2 Sugar Tone 3: curve ma3 Horse Tone 4: down mai4 To Sell The 5th tone is called "light" tone, which has no number as label. Characters with light tone should be pronounced light and fast, the only exceptions to the previous rule that all characters in a sentence lasts about the same long. We will introduce how to pronounce the four tones in the next class. It is important to remember that Chinese character's tone has nothing to do with its meaning. |
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