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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.
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 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.
Kun'yomi (訓読み) is a way of pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese. It is the pronunciation of the Japanese synonymous word that uses a Chinese character. Therefore, kun'yomi readings only borrow the form and meaning of Chinese characters, and do not use the Chinese pronunciations.
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.
This Zhuyin table is a complete listing of all Zhuyin (Bopomofo) syllables used in the Republic of China as auxiliary to Chinese language studies while in Mainland China an adaptation of the Latin alphabet is used to represent Chinese phonemes in the Pinyin system.
The Yunjing (simplified Chinese: 韵镜; traditional Chinese: 韻鏡; pinyin: Yùnjìng; lit. 'Mirror of rhymes') is one of the two oldest existing examples of a Chinese rime table – a series of charts which arrange Chinese characters in large tables according to their tone and syllable structures to indicate their proper pronunciations.
In pinyin, each Chinese syllable is spelled in terms of an optional initial and a final, each of which is represented by one or more letters. Initials are initial consonants, whereas finals are all possible combinations of medials ( semivowels coming before the vowel), a nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant).