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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.
The Yale romanization of Mandarin is a system for transcribing the sounds of Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. [1] It was devised in 1943 by the Yale sinologist George Kennedy for a course teaching Chinese to American soldiers, and was popularized by continued development of that course at Yale.
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.
Identifying the specific pronunciation of a character within a specific context [a] (e.g. 行 as xíng (to walk; behaviour, conduct) or háng (a store)). Recitation of Chinese text in one Chinese variety by literate speakers of another mutually unintelligible one, e.g. Mandarin and Cantonese. Learning Classical or Modern Chinese.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...