The Chinese Alphabet - Is There Such A Thing?

Written by Rosie Wang


There are so many people onrepparttar Internet looking for Chinese Alphabet; we received a lot of inquiries asking aboutrepparttar 139850 Chinese alphabet, questions like "Can you publishrepparttar 139851 Chinese alphabet online?" or "Where can I findrepparttar 139852 Chinese alphabet?" etc.

You can stop your search now because there is no such thing as Chinese alphabet.

The English word "alphabet" comes fromrepparttar 139853 first two letters ofrepparttar 139854 Greek alphabet (alpha and beta) because it wasrepparttar 139855 Greeks who adopted this writing system fromrepparttar 139856 Middle East and spread it torepparttar 139857 rest of Europe.

Every alphabet system consists of a rather small number ( 20 - 50 ) of letters that represent sound values used in spoken language.

Each ofrepparttar 139858 letters ofrepparttar 139859 alphabet represents a sound that generally has no particular meaning. Usingrepparttar 139860 letters ofrepparttar 139861 alphabet, one can write downrepparttar 139862 words of spoken language.

Chinese Pinyin or Hanyu Pinyin Overview

Written by Rosie Wang


Chinese Pinyin isrepparttar romanization ofrepparttar 139849 Chinese "written sound". Romanization approximates Mandarin pronunciation with Western spellings and includes a tone mark to signifyrepparttar 139850 pitch of a word.

Just like alphabet A - Z to English, Pinyin provides a phonetic alphabet for Chinese and is taught from Grade 1 in Chinese elementary schools. It is a fundamental tool used for learningrepparttar 139851 spelling of Chinese characters throughout Chinese language study.

Pinyin is used by most modern Chinese dictionaries to denote pronunciation of characters. It is also an efficient input method in Chinese computer software, which is natively supported by Microsoft Windows OS.

After mastering Pinyin, you can easily read Chinese books with Pinyin marked, learn Chinese characters by looking inrepparttar 139852 dictionary, or input Chinese characters into your computer, it will take your Chinese study to a higher level.

25 out of 26 English alphabet letters are used in Pinyin. Letter 'v' is not used, while letter ' ü ' is added to representrepparttar 139853 vowel sound of 'yu'.

Pinyin includes consonants and vowel letters.

1. Consonant letters

There are 20 consonant letters use in Mandarin (three consonants are represented by combinations of two letters - 'zh', 'ch' and 'sh'), they are:

b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r, y, w

2. Vowel letters

There are 6 vowel letters used in Mandarin:

a, o, e, i, u, ü

3. Syllables

Syllables are composed by consonants, vowels and tone.

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