Learning Chinese - Pīnyīn

So let's start at the beginning. The first thing to tackle is the pronunciation. Since you already know English, the easiest way to start learning via the romanisation of Chinese characters. Which brings us to pīnyīn.

Background
Pīnyīn, created in the 1950s, was not the first romanisation system of Chinese characters but it is the official one. Unfortunately, it is not a completely accurate romanisation but we hope to get round that.

For foreigners, Pīnyīn is extensively used to express the pronunciation and tone (which will be covered in the next section). However, in proper Chinese usage, pīnyīn should not be used. Remember, it is only an aid to learn Chinese. The exception to this is when typing out Chinese on a keyboard, as (most) keyboards don't have every single Chinese character. However, in this case, you should be figuring out the pīnyīn from the character, not the other way around.

Before pīnyīn, native Chinese learners did not use pīnyīn, learning just via time and experience. After the creation of pīnyīn, it is now used by native Chinese learners.

Pronunciation
As mentioned above, the pronunciation of pīnyīn doesn't quite match up with their English counterparts and while there are a limited number of sounds for Chinese characters, there are a lot, 407 to be exact, excluding tones. At the moment, let's ignore tones, or at least try to say these in a neutral tone.

All the pronunciations can split into two parts. Let's use zhong as an example:
 * The initial is the first part of the pīnyīn that consists of zero, one or two consonants. In this case, the initial is zh.
 * The final is the second part, which starts with a least one vowel and might end in consonants, that we will split into subparts below. This part is not optional. In this case, the final is ong.

Pīnyīn table
Don't panic but below is the pīnyīn table. Each initial has its own row and each final has their own column. Do not bother learning these off by heart. As mentioned above, it's the Chinese characters that you need to remember.

So let's tackle this table. We'll start with the initials on the next page.

