Pinyin-Introduction

Pinyin is the standard romanization system used in China, and you may find it's somewhat similar to the English counterpart in either spelling, writing or pronunciation. However, it is most important to notice the difference
Accurate pronunciation at the outset should never be overstated. There are many books you can refer to, but here I just want to make it simple and I would like you to follow those steps when practise pronunciation:

Listen->Mimic->Practice->Correct

Just repeat the above steps until you find yourself speak exactly the same as the sample sound.

CC's Note:
Do NOT even think about the corresponding characters and their meaning when you pronounce some words. Just focus on the pronunciation first!

A syllable is composed of three parts:
(1) Initial;
(2) Final;
(3) Tone (4 of them).
For example:
wō contains 3 parts:
w (initial) + o (final) + -(tone)

Our experience is that people usually confuse (1) and (2) with their home tongue (e.g., the pronunciation of 'j'), and cannot remember what the 4 tones sound like. It can be overcome just by some effort.
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We will start with Pinyin

As you can find more detail in Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin), this is the phonetic notation for standard Mandarin. And honestly, that is what we learned in elementary school where we started to get exposed to Mandarin.

There are some other alternative approaches to master Chinese, and I will explain why I choose this way. Mandarin is the official language in Mainland China, the dominant one in Chinese community. Cantonese is used in Hong Kong as the official one, and it has a phonetic nonation based on English instead of Pinyin. That is way you may find the forms of English representation of their Chinese names vary a lot--just because they are under different phonetic system.

Take the famous Hong Kong-borne movie star Chow Yun-fat (This is his original name and if you pronounce following that, you are speaking Cantonese) for example, in Pinyin the name should be Zhōu Rùnfā.

We will talk more about this rule of pronunciation in the following days. It is not hard at all. As long as you grasp these basic skills, you can start to speak Chinese soon. So are you ready?

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Route Map

Due to our experience in studying and teaching English, we believe the most important thing to learn a second language is to blurt out! There might be things like grammar, vocabulary and so on. But we all know that memorizing alone is almost useless on a practical basis, and you can remember it for your lifetime if you use certain word or phrase correctly in some occasion.

So we will start with Pinyin, the way to pronounce Mandarin. Learning this you can lay the foundation to continue studying Chinese characters by any standard dictionary (there are alternatives, of course, and I will explain that later in the next article).

Then we can study (and we hope you can memorize) some useful everyday dialogue and words (nouns), which you can try to use either to you Chinese friends or in China town. Please note that so far there is no special emphasis on Chinese character so far. We think that you will find them interesting in this process and the only thing left is to memorize how it looks like--You already know its pronunciation, meaning, aren't you?

Along the way, we will help you keep accumulating the core elements of (everyday) Chinese and hope that it will build the blocks for you to really master this language.

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