Introduction to Pinyin

Basics of Pinyin
Introduction to Pinyin
Pinyin is the Chinese language's phonetic system. It is the most commonly used Latin alphabet-based system of writing Mandarin Chinese. Chinese characters, unlike English letters, do not always convey how they should sound when pronounced. Therefore, Pinyin was invented, a Romanized pronunciation system for easier pronunciation. Apart from that, Pinyin is also a common way of typing Chinese.

Why do we need to learn Pinyin?
Chinese characters are made up of many strokes. For example, here is the word "妈妈” which means mother in English.

By looking at the Chinese characters, do you know how to pronounce them? You are not able to pronounce the character by only looking at the strokes.

Components of Pinyin
Pinyin is made up of 3 parts, which are the initial, final, and tone.



Example


Initial and Finals in Pinyin
There is a total of 23 initials and 24 finals in Pinyin.

Let’s take a look at the tables below.
INITIAL
b p m f d t n l
g k h j q x zh ch
sh r z c s y w  


FINAL
a o e i u ü
ai ei ui ao ou iu
ie üe er an en in
un ün ang eng ing ong


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