Learning Chinese Pinyin

Learning Chinese Pinyin is a very crucial step towards learning Mandarin Chinese. Pinyin is a Romanized system of the Chinese language that was developed in China during the 1950's and has since become the official Romanized Chinese system of China, Singapore, the American Library Association and the US Library of Congress. A Romanized system also helps in exchanging data between different countries.

It is imperative for a student of the language that he or she studies the Pinyin system so that they can start to understand the tonal nature of the language. Pinyin allows for learning the language with out the need for understanding the Chinese characterization.

The four tones of Pinyin are expressed thus:

The first tone which is a flat tone,
The second tone which is a rising tone,
The third tone which is a falling rising tone,
and the fourth tone which is a falling tone.

For example "hello" in Pinyin can be written as "nĭ hăo".

Students starting out will also need to understand that the individual sounds in Pinyin are not always the same as in English. For example 'c' in Pinyin is pronounced like 'ts' in bits.

For people interested in learning the language, excellent resources can be found online. Many websites offer instructions in the form of tables and charts from which the different sounds and tones can be learnt. However some more professional sites offer software based solutions and are designed for people who do not have any experience in Chinese. A simple search on any search engine can reveal excellent resources.

Apart from this it must be remembered that Pinyin is not a perfect system and like any other language system in the world has its shortcomings. However it is an invaluable tool for those who are willing to learn the Chinese language and must be learnt.

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