Pinyin

The Pinyin system is the accepted standard for the romanization of Chinese characters. Pinyin means spell sound and is used to teach the standard pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese. It is also the standard system for entering Chinese characters on computers. Because of this standardization, it is the method I use in my lessons. You can […]

How to Pronounce Chinese words written in the Pinyin Romanization

The Pinyin system is the accepted standard for the romanization of Chinese characters. Pinyin means spell sound and is used to teach the standard pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese. It is also the standard system for entering Chinese characters on computers. Because of this standardization, it is the method I use in my lessons.

You can be confident that if you pronounce the words as I present them in these lessons, you are close to the actual Chinese pronunciation. I am not a Chinese language speaker, and I do not get these pronunciations correct each time either. The following chart helps me with some tricky characters:

Letter	Pronunciation
a	father
ai	eye
ang	gang
b	bay or spit
c	hats
ch	church or nuture
d	stay
e	her
ei	eight or hey
eng	sung
er	are
j	jeep or ajar
i	see
ia	asia or yard
ie	yes
o	saw
p	pay
q	cheer
r	leisure
sh	shirt
t	turn
u	rude
x	she
y	flee or yea
z	reads or suds
zh	junk

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