Learn to Speak Chinese Putonghua
學說中國普通話
What does one need to communicate with other people? It is the knowledge of the language they are speaking. There are over 1 billion people speaking Chinese -- Putonghua (普通話) or Mandarin (國語) in China, Taiwan, Singapore, and all over the world. To communicate with them, one needs to learn to speak this language. This homepage helps English speaking people in the west learn to speak Putonghua, hence enables them to communicate with the people in the east.

Introduction to Putonghua
Putonghua Pinyin
Putonghua Syllabary
Putonghua Accent
Common Putonghua Conversation
To be decided
Introduction 引言

 There are over a billion people in China. While written characters are the same throughout the country, there are tens of different dialects spoken by the Chinese. Putonghua (普通話) means common language. It was based on the Beijing dialect and had been developed to become the Chinese national language.

In 1958, China introduced a system of Chinese phonetics --Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu (漢語) is Spoken Chinese, and Pinyin (拼音) means spelling Chinese words phonetically. It adopted the generally used Latin alphabets to closely represent the pronunciation of Chinese words. Pinyin is easy to learn, easy to identify Chinese characters, and easy to type.

Hanyu Pinyin system is composed of consonants (shengmu 聲母), vowels (yunmu 韻母), accent symbols (shengdiao fuhao 聲調符號), and separation symbols (geyin fuhao 隔音符號). It specified spelling rules, and is now widely used in Chinese dictionaries, teaching Putonghua, translation of Chinese names, places and technical terms, and in computer bar codes.

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Pinyin 拼音
Sentences spoken in Chinese are composed of phrases (ci 詞). A phrase can be a single syllable or multiple syllables (yinjie 音節). Yinjie is the most natural articulation unit. It is a single Chinese character in written Chinese.
A yinjie is made up of two parts. The first part is shengmu (consonant) and the second part is yunmu (vowel). For example, ba (八), where b is shengmu and a is yunmu. Some yinjie contains only yunmu without shengmu, as in the yinjie a (啊).
Yunmu are pronounced loudly while shengmu are not. Yunmu are sub-divided into single yunmu (單韻母), diphthong (fuyunmu 複韻母), and nasal yunmu (biyunmu 鼻韻母).

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