There is no Chinese alphabet actually. The syllable is what gets closer to our conception of the alphabet we use for spelling words in the Westerner languages. But in Chinese syllable,there are two important elements:an initial and a final. An initial is Shengmu, and all the Shengmu you can see Shengmu list. A final is Yunmu, all the Yunmu you can see Yunmu list. A syllable consists of an initial + a final or a final without an initial. An initial also is a consonant. Yunmu is a single vowel like ” a, e, o ” and the compound yun like ” ao and an “as examples. Chinese alphabet have 21 shengmu and the 38 yunmu.
Every syllable in Chinese has a clearly defined pitch of voice associated with it to distinguish characters with the same sound from each other.Pinyin uses four easily-remembered diacritical marks to tell you what the tones of words are. They are fisrt tone, second tone, third tone and fourth tone, another without any marks tone is unstressed syllable.
Pinyin is a romanization and not an anglicization. Pinyin uses Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin Chinese. The way these letters represent sounds in Standard Mandarin Chinese will differ from how other languages that use the Roman alphabet represent sound. Pinyin is a very useful tool to learn to get around China. The Chinese view their characters as the true Chinese written language, but pinyin can be seen on many maps, road signs, and other notices. Pinyin is much easier to learn, use and remember than characters, particularly if tones are ignored.
|English Alphabet||Chinese Pronunciation||Pinyin|
|W||豆贝尔维||dòu bèi ěr wéi|
|X||艾克斯||yī kè sī|
|Yunmu List||Chinese Pronunciation||Pinyin|
The pinyin system also uses diacritics to mark the four tones of Mandarin. The diacritic is placed over the letter that represents thesyllable nucleus, unless that letter is missing.Before the advent of computers, many typewriter fonts did not contain vowels with macron or caron diacritics. Tones were thus represented by placing a tone number at the end of individual syllables.
- ma1 or mā (high level tone)
- ma2 or má (rising tone)
- ma3 or mǎ (falling rising tone)
- ma4 or mà (falling tone)
|第一声（阴平）||First tone||Dì yī shēng||-||ā|
|第二声（阳平）||Second tone||Dì ér shēng||/||á|
|第三声（上声）||Third tone||Dì sān shēng||\/||ǎ|
|第四声（去声）||Fourth tone||Dì sì shēng||\||à|
|轻声||Tone of unstressed syllable||Qīngshēng||a|
Chinese Alphabet(pinyin) is a system for writing standard Mandarin Chinese using the Roman alphabet. It was developed by the People’s Republic of China in 1958, and implemented in 1979. It is used exclusively in mainland China. Over the years pinyin has become widely accepted by the international community, replacing older systems of Romanization such as the Wade-Giles system.