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Chinese character sounds (simplified Chinese: 汉字字音; traditional Chinese: 漢字字音; pinyin: hànzì zìyīn) are the pronunciations of Chinese characters. The standard sounds of Chinese characters are based on the phonetic system of the Beijing dialect. [1] Normally a Chinese character is read with one syllable.
Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
Many non-native Chinese speakers have difficulties mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). Statistically, tones are as important as vowels in Standard Chinese.
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Standard Mandarin pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see {{}}, Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.
Books containing both Chinese characters and pinyin are often used by foreign learners of Chinese. Pinyin's role in teaching pronunciation to foreigners and children is similar in some respects to furigana -based books with hiragana letters written alongside kanji (directly analogous to bopomofo) in Japanese, or fully vocalised texts in Arabic.
Romanization of Chinese is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Chinese.Chinese uses a logographic script and its characters do not represent phonemes directly. . There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chinese throughout hi
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...
Chinese characters [a] are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only one that has remained in continuous use. Over a documented history spanning more than three millennia, the ...