The Chinese Syllable and Pronunciation

class

    As we have mentioned in the class 1 (Chinese Writing System), Chinese writing is represented by "Characters". Each Chinese character represents a syllable. In this class, we will talk about syllable and Chinese pronunciation (Pinyin).

A syllable usually include three parts:
1. An initial consonant
2. A final of vowels or vowels with ending consonants
3. A tone

    We will talk about the first two parts in this lesson, and talk about the tone in next class.

PART 1: Initial Consonant

    There are 23 initial consonant which could be categorized into seven groups. Please follow the video for their pronunciation.

    group 1:     b    p    m    f
    group 2:     d     t     n     l
    group 3:     g     k     h
    group 4:     j      q    x
    group 5:     z       c    s
    group 6:     zh    ch    sh    r
    group 7:     y     w

PART 2: Finals

    There are two kinds of finals: simple finals and compound finals.

       Simple Finals: There are six simple finals are the following
                                a    o     e
                                i     u    ü

Compound Finals:

A compound final could include a main vowel and one or two secondary vowels. For example:

ai ei ui

ao ou iu

ie üe er

Or a compound final could include a main vowel and one secondary vowel followed by a nasal ending (nasal ending is n or ng). For example:

                                an        en       in
                                ang     eng     ing     ong
                                ian        iang    iong

We will do some practice to combine the initial and final together as in the video for the following syllable. Here we use the first tone for all the examples.

                            m + a => ma
                          b + a => ba
                            zh + e => zhe
                            ch + e => che
                            p + o => po
                          g + u => gu
                            t + an => tan
                          t + ian => tian
                            c + ai => cai
                            d + ao => dao
                            ch + en => chen
                            ch + eng => cheng
                           zh + an => zhan
                             zh + ang => zhang
                             b + ing    => bing

The Chinese Syllable

and Pronunciation Video

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