How many initials and finals in pinyin

In the table shown to the right, the syllable is ma but the tone is different. In fact, we can assemble the following sentence:.

Properly pronounced, the sentence translates into "Does Mamma scold the horse? Mandarin is normally said to have just four tones. However, there is also a neutral tone which does not occur very often but is just as important. The tone is indicated by a tone mark placed on top the vowel.

It should be placed on the letter a or e is present, on the letter o in the ou final, and on the last vowel in all other cases. Note that the tone changes only orally, and the written version will keep the original tone marks.

Try to pronounce the following syllable:. Jing Cao is the chief-editor and co-founder of DigMandarin. She has a master's degree in Chinese Linguistics and Language Aquisition and has taught thousands of students for the past years. She devotes herself to the education career of making Chinese learning easier throughout the world.

I do love to learn more about Chinese language and I thank the Chinese language teachers for the work done. Your email address will not be published. Overview Pinyin is the system of symbols for the phonetic notation of all Chinese characters. Others are called compound finals.

Rules about spelling: 1. Sounds pretty easy and interesting. But how do these Latin letters make up pinyin? Well, actually, those letters have their own names in Chinese. As for the short line, it is the tone marked above the final.

How many sounds are there in Chinese? There are 21 initials and 38 finals in total. Look at this form. We will explain them in the future. So there can be about syllables in Chinese. No, actually not that many. Some initials and some finals cannot be combined together. So just syllables then. That sounds like a lot less than before. Yes, but remember we have tones. We have four tones in Chinese.

You can see here that tones are marked above the finals. The first tone is the highest. The second tone is the rising tone. The third tone falls first, and then rises. The fourth tone is a falling tone. Actually, we have another tone. We read it quickly and lightly. Initials, finals, and tones— these three components combine together to represent the pronunciation of Chinese.

So how are the initials and finals are pronounced and how can we combine them into syllables? If you would like to know as well, come back next time. Share this post. Laoshi and students did a