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Pinyin is the standard

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:

LetterPronunciation
afather
aieye
anggang
bbay or spit
chats
chchurch or nuture
dstay
eher
eieight or hey
engsung
erare
jjeep or ajar
isee
iaasia or yard
ieyes
osaw
ppay
qcheer
rleisure
shshirt
tturn
urude
xshe
yflee or yea
zreads or suds
zhjunk

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