Learning English-Chinese Pinyin

Pinyin is a form of understanding the Chinese language without having to go through its hard characterization first. Pinyin was first passed in China in about 1958 and has since become the only official Romanization script for the Chinese language accepted in China, Singapore, American Library Association, and The US Library of Congress. Such a system is also important for International data exchange.

In order to learn Chinese a student of the language will first have to understand its tonal nature. In Chinese the meaning of the word tends to change with the way it is said. The following is how the different sounds are expressed in Pinyin.

First Tone: This tone is flat and is indicated by a - upon the vowel.

Second tone: This tone is of a rising nature and is indicated by a small / upon the vowel. It is used for asking questions.

Third tone: This tone starts falling and then finally goes up. This is indicated by a 'v' upon the vowel.

Fourth tone: is used to signify a strong feeling against something. This is indicated by a '\'on the vowel.

Thus anyone learning Chinese can first go through Pinyin and then gradually make his or her way into the harder characters that must be inevitably tackled. There are many training tools and aids that are available online that can be used to learn Pinyin with many of these being software based which are interactive and are essentially designed to teach a person who would like to understand the language all on him or herself.

It must be remembered that Pinyin like any other system is far from perfect. However it is a very good tool that can be used to understand the Chinese language system and can even be considered indispensable.

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