Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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. Some Chinese characters have more than one pronunciation (polyphonic characters). Some syllables correspond to more than one character (homophonic characters). [2]
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Mandarin on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Mandarin in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
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.
A Chinese vowel diagram or Chinese vowel chart is a schematic arrangement of the vowels of the Chinese language, which usually refers to Standard Chinese.The earliest known Chinese vowel diagrams were made public in 1920 by Chinese linguist Yi Tso-lin with the publication of his Lectures on Chinese Phonetics, three years after Daniel Jones published the famous "cardinal vowel diagram" in 1917.
The Institute of Language in Education Scheme (Chinese: 教院式拼音方案) also known as the List of Cantonese Pronunciation of Commonly-used Chinese Characters romanization scheme (常用字廣州話讀音表), ILE scheme, and Cantonese Pinyin, [1] is a romanization system for Cantonese developed by Ping-Chiu Thomas Yu (Chinese: 余秉昭) in 1971, [2] [3] and subsequently modified by the ...
The Bopomofo characters were created by Zhang Binglin, taken mainly from "regularized" forms of ancient Chinese characters, the modern readings of which contain the sound that each letter represents. The consonants are listed in order of place of articulation , from the front of the mouth to the back, /b/, /p/, /m/, /f/, /d/, /t/, /n/, /l/ etc.
The below table indicates possible combinations of initials and finals in Standard Chinese, but does not indicate tones, which are equally important to the proper pronunciation of Chinese. Although some initial-final combinations have some syllables using each of the five different tones, most do not.
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 ...