{"id":9819,"date":"2019-11-21T00:43:54","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T00:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/introductory-chinese\/pinyin\/"},"modified":"2019-11-21T00:43:54","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T00:43:54","slug":"pinyin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/fr\/pinyin\/","title":{"rendered":"Pinyin"},"content":{"rendered":"
Pinyin is essential and most fundamental knowledge for all serious Chinese learners. If you are learning Chinese, no matter if you are a beginner or an advanced learner, you shall be aware of paramount im<\/em>portance of Pinyin. Good knowledge in Pinyin can greatly help you express yourself more clearly; it can also help you in archiving better listening comprehension. Before learning how to read, write, or pro<\/em>nounce Chinese characters, you must learn pinyin first.<\/p>\n

Pinyin or Pin Yin is a short for Hanyu Pinyin, which literally means “spelled sound” (phonetics). Pin means “spelling” and Yin means “sound”. Pinyin is a system of Romanization (pho<\/em>nemic notation and trans<\/em>cription to Roman s<\/em>cript) for Mandarin Chinese. Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by the government in the People’s Republic of China.<\/p>\n

Since then, Pinyin has been accepted by the Government of Singapore, the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and most internatio<\/em>nal institutions as the preferred trans<\/em>cription system for Mandarin Chinese. In 1979 the Internatio<\/em>nal Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as the standard Romanization for modern Chinese (ISO-7098:1991).<\/p>\n

Pinyin uses Roman letters to represent sounds in Mandarin Chinese. The way these letters represent sounds in Mandarin Chinese differs from how other languages that use the Roman alphabet represent sound. Pinyin uses the same letters as the English alphabet except for the letter v plus the addition of \u016b. All of the co<\/em>nsonants represent basically the same sound that they have in English with some exceptions. For example, the sounds indicated in Pinyin by ‘b’ and ‘p’ are distinguished from each other by aspiration in a manner different from that of both English, which has voicing and aspiration, and of French, which has voicing alone. Other letters like ’j’, ‘q’, ‘x’ or ‘zh’ indicate sounds that do not correspond to any exact sound in English. Some of the trans<\/em>criptions in Pinyin such as ‘ang’, do not correspond to English pronunciation, either. Pinyin has also become a useful tool for entering Chinese language text into computers.
Tips for Learning Pinyin<\/p>\n

    Chinese is not a pho<\/em>netic language. Chinese pro<\/em>nunciation is not related to the writing of Chinese characters.
    “Pinyin“, “Hanyu Pinin” or “Chinese Pinyin” is a way to use Roman letters to represent the pro<\/em>nunciation of the Chinese characters.
    Pinyin does not represent English pro<\/em>nunciation and should not be pro<\/em>nounced according to English conventions. You are advised to learn Pinyin pho<\/em>netic conventions, bearing in mind that many sounds have no equivalents in English.
    Since Pinyin is ba<\/em>sed o<\/em>nly on the sounds of Mandarin Chinese, Pinyin is unsuitable for use for speakers of some other Chinese spoken dialects, because the sounds do not correspond to their speech.
    There are many homo<\/em>nyms in mandarin Chinese. Pinyin can be ambiguous, especially when transcribing Standard Written Chinese, which uses formal co<\/em>nstructions not often found in speech. However, this should not be an issue in the trans<\/em>cription of normal spoken Mandarin co<\/em>nversation since speakers would not use such ambiguous co<\/em>nstructions in speech.
    One more im<\/em>portant note on Pinyin is that each syllable represents one character, because each character in Chinese has o<\/em>nly one syllable.
    When learning Chinese Pinyin and the tones, we recommend you pro<\/em>nounce LOUDLY with the recording each time you hear one.<\/p>\n

Pinyin is the basic foundation for learning Chinese. Are you on the right track for learning Chinese? If you develop a bad pro<\/em>nunciation habit, it will be very difficult to make a correction.
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