and thorough polishing of the English in this book. Working together, we finally completed this revision!
Yi Ren
How to access the online Audio Recordings and Answer Key for this book:
1. Check that you have an Internet connection.
2. Type the URL below into to your web browser.
https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/Mandarin-Chinese-for-Beginners
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Pinyin 拼音 Pīn yīn
An ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao Zi, said: “A journey of a thousand miles starts with one single step.”
So, now that you have this book open, what next? What is that first single step in learning Chinese? It’s learning pinyin!
Pinyin is a Romanized spelling system. When we learn English, we start with A, B, and C; and in learning Chinese, we start with pinyin. Did you know that Chinese children begin learning pinyin before they start to learn Chinese characters? It’s used like the phonetic symbol system used in English: it shows us how to pronounce sounds, and then characters. And most of the pronunciations are similar to those of the English letters.
When you become familiar with pinyin, you will feel like you have a strong pair of wings and are able to fly freely among Chinese characters, just the way native Chinese speakers do in speaking, reading, and writing this language.
Okay, let’s start to learn pinyin. First of all, you need to know that pinyin is composed of three elements: initials, finals, and tones. What are initials? Take a look at the chart below, and turn on your audio. Follow along with me and read the initials out loud.
Unit 1 Consonants/Initials 第一单元—声母
There are 23 initials in Chinese.
| b | p | m | f |
| d | t | n | l |
| g | k | h | |
| j | q | x | |
| z | c | s | |
| zh | ch | sh | r |
| y | w |
The sound of some initials is similar to that of English letters:
| b like “b” in ball | p like “p” in push | m like “m” in mine | f like “f” in far |
| d like “d” in day | t like “t” in tea | n like “n” in name | l like “l” in look |
| g like “g” in girl | k like “k” in kind | h like “h” in hot | |
| j like “j” in just | q like “ch” in cheese | x like “sh” in sheep | |
| z like “ds” in reads | c like “ts” in sits | s like “s” in silk | |
| zh like “dge” in judge | ch like “ch” in rich | sh like “sh” in shop | r like “r” in rubber |
| y like “y” in yellow | w like “w” in way |
When you read, you will find that the letters Z, C, S, Zh, Ch, Sh, R, and X are not quite as easy to pronounce. This is because there are no sounds exactly like them in English. Don’t worry about it, because correct sounds will come to you with more practice. Let’s repeat them one more time, as you play the recording again.
See, you sound better already.
Now we move onto Unit 2: Vowels/Finals. Listen to the audio of vowels/finals, and repeat the sounds you hear as you read the table.
Unit 2 Vowels/Finals 第二单元—韵母
| a | o | e |
| i | u | ü |
| a like “a” in spa | o like “o” in voice | e like “ear” in earn |
| i: a long e sound, like “ee” in feet | u like “oo” in boom | ü like “u” in French tu or “ü” in German Führer. |
Finals are much easier, right? These six are the basic and most common finals.
Since you have learned “Initials” and “Finals” now, I’ll tell you some encouraging facts: most Chinese words are pronounced by combining initials and finals. Look at these three simple Chinese words:
I — wǒ You — nǐ He — tā
You can see that when the initial “w” and the final “o” combine, they form a Chinese word “wǒ” which means “I” in English. The words nǐ
