Lesson 1.3: Pinyin

As you learned in Lesson 1.1, Hanzi is a non-phonetic writing system, which means that the pronunciation of a typical character has nothing to do with its written form. That creates a problem for learners because, when you first learn a character, you can’t learn how to pronounce it without listening to an audio recording, which might be unavailable, unclear, or difficult to standardize.

Fortunately, Chinese speakers have devised a solution called Pinyin (from the Chinese 拼音). Pinyin is a transliteration system used to record the pronunciation of Chinese in the Latin alphabet, the same alphabet used in English. You’ve actually seen it many times in the last two lessons: it’s the Latin-alphabet syllables listed between any Chinese text and its translation. Please note that Pinyin is not a form of Chinese: it’s simply a tool for recording Chinese pronunciation.

Examples: zhōng; chuán; hǎo; shì; ma

Pinyin is broken up into syllables, where one syllable describes one character. Each Chinese syllable, and thus each Pinyin syllable, has three parts:

1. Initial: a consonant at the beginning of the syllable (some characters don’t have these)
2. Final: one or more vowels at the end of the syllable, possibly combined with ending consonants
3. Tone: one of the four tones from Lesson 1.2 (or neutral tone)

Initials

The Chinese initials are:

Remember, some characters don’t have an initial, but every character has a final and a tone.

Finals

There are three types of finals: simple finals, compound finals, and nasal finals.

The simple finals are:

Compound finals are just combinations of multiple simple finals (with the exception of “er”). The compound finals are:

Nasal Finals

Tones

The main way a syllable’s tone is denoted in Pinyin is by placing a tone mark over one of the vowels, as so:

• First tone: mā
• Second tone: má
• Third tone: mǎ
• Fourth tone: mà
• Neutral tone: ma (no tone mark)

As an alternative that’s easier to type, numbers can be used instead of tone marks as so:

• First tone: ma1
• Second tone: ma2
• Third tone: ma3
• Fourth tone: ma4
• Neutral tone: ma5 or ma0 or ma

Notice how the shape of each tone mark matches the way the pitch changes for that tone: the first tone mark is flat, the second tone mark rises, the third tone mark dips down, then up, and the fourth tone mark falls. That should make them pretty easy to remember.

It’s not critical for you to know which vowel the tone mark goes on when there are multiple vowels, but in case you’d like to know, it goes on the first vowel in this list that is present in the syllable: a o e i u ü. That means that it will always go on a if a is present, otherwise it will go on o if o is present, otherwise it will go on i if… and it will only go on ü if no other vowels are present.

Formal Initials

There’s one last detail about Pinyin that you should be aware of, and that has to do with how certain vowels change form at the beginning of syllables. The following vowels change form when they appear at the beginning of a syllable:

• i becomes y
• u becomes w
• ü becomes yu

However, if obeying the above rules would give you a syllable without any vowels (like “yn” or “w”), then make the following changes instead:

• i becomes yi
• u becomes wu
• ü still becomes yu

The letters y and w are called “formal initials” in Pinyin because, while they may look like initials, they are actually placeholders for vowels. When you’re pronouncing pinyin, just remember to pronounce those letters as the vowels they stand for.

Implied ü

In all of the thousands of Chinese characters, there is not a single one that contains a u sound after the initials j, q, or x. For that reason, when the ü sound comes after one of those initials, the umlaut is dropped and the sound is written as u instead.

When you’re pronouncing Pinyin, just remember that u actually stands for ü when it comes after j, q, or x.

And that’s how Pinyin works! It may seem like a lot at first, but as you get to know it, this system will serve as one of your most important guides as you explore and master Chinese.

To practice what you’ve learned, try predicting how these syllables will be pronounced, then click them to check yourself:

• qí
• shǔ
• pān
• bàng
• yǔ
• shéi
• ròu
• guǐ
• nǚ
• yīng
• hào
• lún