Tag: Pronunciation

Pronunciation Challenges

Many of the sounds of Mandarin have approximate counterparts in English, but there are few sounds which are more challenging. They don’t have English equivalents and therefore need to be practiced more diligently than the other Mandarin sounds.

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Classification of Chinese Dialects

Chinese consists of a number of dialect continuums. Variations in speech usually become far more pronounced as distances boost, with handful of radical breaks. Nonetheless, the degree of change in intelligibility varies immensely based on region. For instance, the varieties of Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces are mutually intelligible, but in the province of Fujian, where the use of the Min range is dominant, the same selection has to become divided into no less than five distinct subdivisions because the subdivisions are all mutually unintelligible to one anther.
In the book, "The Middle kingdom: a survey of the … Chinese empire and its inhabitants …", published in 1848, the different varieties of Chinese had been described as "dialects", the book acknowledged that they were mutually unintelligible as well as the term "dialect" was utilized in a distinct sense than the western term, in which a dialect was merely indicative of a little distinction in pronunciation, while in China, the entire grammar and idiom had been distinct, the written language was what united the different Chinese dialects. The distinction between Mandarin and other Chinese "dialects" is simply comparable to that between English and its Germanic cousin languages (German, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, and so on.)
Mandarin (Common Chinese) is the dominant selection, far more widely studied than the rest. Outdoors of China, the only two varieties generally presented in formal courses are Mandarin and Cantonese. In China, second-language acquisition is normally achieved by means of immersion in the neighborhood language.

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Dialect of Yue

Today what I want to show you is the dialect of Yue (粤语 yuèyǔ). Yue is a variety of Chinese spoken mostly in Guangdong (广东 Guǎngdōng), Guangxi (广西 Guǎngxī), Hong Kong (香港 Xiānggǎng) and Macau (澳门 Aomén). You can also find significant Yue-speaking communities overseas in Southeast Asia, Canada, Australia, the United kingdom and USA. There are also considerable Yue-speaking communities overseas in Southeast Asia, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and USA.

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The Four Tones of Chinese

When talking about the differences between English and Chinese, the four tones of Chinese may be the most distinguish characteristic. The four tones of Mandarin are basic facets of the language for everybody learning the best way to speak Chinese. Mandarin Chinese, like most other Chinese dialects, is a tonal language, Which means that tones, like consonants and vowels, are used to distinguish words from one another. Mastering the tone of each character is challenging for many foreigners learning Chinese, but correct tonal pronunciation is vital for intelligibility because of the huge quantity of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). The following would be the four tones of Normal Mandarin.

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The Usage of Pinyin

Pinyin is adopted and used by all over the world nowadays. It superseded older romanization systems like Wade-Giles (1859; modified 1892) and Chinese Postal Map Romanization, and replaced zhuyin as the way of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for contemporary Chinese in 1982 (ISO 7098:1982, superseded by ISO 7098:1991); the United Nations followed suit in 1986. The government of Singapore also accepted this system, as well as the United States' Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and many other international institutions.

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History of Hanyu Pinyin

Every one who have learned Chinese must know pinyin. It's a basic learning tool of Chinese pronunciation. But just a little person clearly know where it comes from. This articles will show you the mysterious history of pinyin. Then you will know how it was created and how it changes.

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