80/20 Guide to Chinese Pronunciation -- Part 1

"Just give me the basics!" That's what this Chinese pronunciation guide is all about. It's all that you need to know Chinese pronunciation to get by. The 80% that's important. To speak Mandarin, the first thing to learn is Chinese pronunciation of words using the system known as pinyin. Pinyin is the Romanized Chinese phonetic system and is the most effective aid to learning Mandarin today. (Romanized means using English alphabets.) Pinyin was invented in the 1950's so that anyone, especially English speaking people, could learn Chinese pronunciation easily. Most of the letters in pinyin have the same sounds as letters of the alphabet - with only a few exceptions. It's really a very practical pronunciation system. Can you imagine an English speaker trying to pronounce Chinese characters without pinyin? (By the way, pinyin is less complicated that the other forms of Romanization for Chinese pronunciation, Wade-Giles and Yale.) First, "The Four Tones" Chinese is a tonal language. Each Chinese character is a syllable with a fixed tone. A different tone is a different Chinese character and hence a different meaning. Chinese pronunciation involves four tones, each indicated by a tone mark. The tone marks are placed over the vowels. (If the letter "i" has a tone mark over it, the dot is removed." First Tone: a high, level tone represented by "-" as in mā 妈 "mother" Second Tone: a rising, questioning tone represented by "/" as in m