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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.
In bopomofo, the mark for first tone is usually omitted but can be included, [19] [20] while a dot above indicates the fifth tone (also known as the neutral tone). In pinyin, a macron (overbar) indicates the first tone, and the lack of a marker usually indicates the fifth (light) tone.
The national pronunciation approved by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was later customarily called the Old National Pronunciation (老國音). Although declared to be based on Beijing pronunciation, it was actually a hybrid of northern and southern pronunciations. The types of tones were specified, but not the tone values.
This table indicates possible combinations of initials and finals in Standard Chinese, but does not indicate tones, which are equally important to the proper pronunciation. Although some initial-final combinations have some syllables using each of the 5 different tones, most do not. Some utilise only one tone.
A tone split occurs as a result of the loss of the voicing distinction in initial consonants. The split tones then merge back together except for Middle Chinese tone 1; hence Middle Chinese tones 1,2,3 become Mandarin tones 1,2,3,4. (Some syllables with original Mandarin tone 3 move to tone 4; see below.)
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.
It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Xiang Chinese in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them. Integrity must be maintained between the key and the transcriptions that link here; do not change any symbol or value without establishing consensus on the talk page first.
This comparison of Standard Chinese transcription systems comprises a list of all syllables which are considered phonemically distinguishable within Standard Chinese. Gwoyeu Romatzyh employs a different spelling for each tone , whereas other systems employ tone marks or superscript numerals.