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Chinese Phonetic - Pinyin

Most Syllables in Chinese are composed of initials, finals and tones. A small number of syllables, however, have only finals and tones, but not initials, eg. There are as many as 1200 syllables in Putonghua.

Initials

The phonetic symbols of putonghua comprises 21 initials that are consonants beginning a syllable.

Finals

The phonetic symbols of putonghua (Standard Chinese) in Modern Chinese comprises 39 finals that are composed of voedls or vowel followed by nasal consonants. These finals fall into three categories:

  • simple finals which have only a single vowel, eg. a,o;
  • multi-finals which have two or three vowels, eg. ai,ua,iao;
  • nasal finals which consist of one or two vowlels and a nasal consonant's eg. an,üan,eng,iong.

    • Tones

    Chinese is a tonal language. There are four basic tones in putonghua as shown by the following tone marks.

  • The first tone. The High and level Tone. Shown by "-"
  • The second tone. The Rising Tone. Shown by "ˊ".
  • The third tone. The Falling-and-Rising Tone. Shown by "ˇ".
  • The fourth tone. The Falling Tone shown by "ˋ".

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