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The pronunciation systems for these vocabularies originated from conscious attempts to consistently approximate the original Chinese sounds while reading Classical Chinese. They are used alongside modern varieties of Chinese in historical Chinese phonology , particularly the reconstruction of the sounds of Middle Chinese .
Korean, Vietnamese, some Chinese dialects and minority languages (such as Zhuang and Yao) that use Chinese characters also have similar pronunciation methods for Chinese characters. In Korea, kun'yomi is called "interpretation reading" (釋讀). These phenomena also appear in Mandarin and English, such as "i.e." is read as "that is".
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.
ChinesePod is a web-based Chinese language-learning service composed of multiple key components: video and audio lessons, mobile apps and exercises for characters, pronunciation and dialogue. There are also virtual classroom sessions for private lessons with Mandarin Chinese teachers.
Also, neologisms usually use the pronunciation of prestigious varieties. [6] Colloquial readings are usually used in informal settings because their usage in formal settings has been supplanted by the readings of the prestige varieties. [6] Because of this, the frequency of literary readings in a Chinese variety reflects its history and status.
Chinese names are personal names used by individuals from Greater China and other parts of the Sinophone world. Sometimes the same set of Chinese characters could be chosen as a Chinese name, a Hong Kong name, a Japanese name, a Korean name, a Malaysian Chinese name, or a Vietnamese name, but they would be spelled differently due to their varying historical pronunciation of Chinese characters.
Chinese Bronze script for po 魄 or 霸 "lunar brightness" Chinese Seal script for po 魄 "soul" Chinese Seal script for hun 魂 "soul". Like many Chinese characters, 魂 and 魄 are "phono-semantic" or "radical-phonetic" graphs combining a semantic radical showing the rough meaning of the character with a phonetic guide to its former pronunciation in Ancient Chinese.
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic ...