Learn what pinyin is
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Intro |
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| Hi everybody! Yinru here. Welcome to Ask a Teacher, where I’ll answer some of your most common Chinese questions. |
| The Question |
| The question for this lesson is: What is pinyin? |
| Explanation |
| 拼音 pīnyīn is the standard, most commonly used phonetic system for transliterating Chinese, meaning spelling out Chinese using Roman letters. When you look up a word in a Chinese dictionary, there is always pinyin assigned to each Chinese character. It's a way to read and pronounce Chinese words through English letters. For example, hàn, spelled h-à (accent)-n, is the pinyin for the symbol 汉，as in 汉族人 Hànzú rén, “the Han people,” an ethnic group of east Asia. Even though most Chinese people can read pinyin, it’s not a substitute for the 汉字 Hànzì, or the “Chinese characters.” This is because 拼音 pīnyīn is the sound system in Chinese, whereas 汉字 Hànzì is the writing system. |
| Here’s an example for the sentence “I can read Chinese characters” in 拼音 pīnyīn and in 汉字 Hànzì. |
| 我认识汉字。Wǒ rènshí hànzì. (“I can read Chinese characaters.”) |
| Sometimes people wonder if they can only learn pinyin and ignore the actual Chinese characters. The short answer is no. Chinese books and newspapers are written with Chinese characters without the use of pinyin, unless they’re written for children who are still learning to read. So, for Chinese beginners, you definitely want to learn Pinyin rules first. |
| Pinyin is usually made of three parts: an initial consonant, a final consisting of one or a combination of vowels, and a tone. There’s a pinyin chart for beginners to learn and memorize the consonants and vowels. We’ll get into the pronunciations of some of the most difficult pinyin sounds in the later episodes. |
Outro |
| How was it? Pretty interesting right? |
| Do you have any more questions? Please leave them in the comments below, and I’ll try to answer them! |
| 我们下期再见吧！(Wǒmen xiàqī zàijiàn ba!) See you in the next episode! |
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