Download Pinyin Tones !FREE!
Tristan Ridings
Hanyu Pinyin incorporated different aspects from existing systems, including Gwoyeu Romatzyh from 1928, Latinxua Sin Wenz from 1931, and the diacritics from bopomofo.[19] "I'm not the father of pinyin", Zhou said years later; "I'm the son of pinyin. It's [the result of] a long tradition from the later years of the Qing dynasty down to today. But we restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect."[20]
In each cell below, the first line indicates IPA, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone (no-initial) form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. Other than finals modified by an -r, which are omitted, the following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals.
The only syllable-final consonants in Standard Chinese are -n, -ng, and -r, the last of which is attached as a grammatical suffix. A Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant either is from a non-Mandarin language (a southern Chinese language such as Cantonese, reflecting final consonants in Old Chinese), or indicates the use of a non-pinyin romanization system, such as one that uses final consonants to indicate tones.
The pinyin system also uses diacritics to mark the four tones of Mandarin (or it could be five tones when considering the neutral tone).[32] In the pinyinn system, four main tones of Mandarin are shown by diacritics: ā, á, ǎ, and à.[33] And there is no symbol or diacritic for the neutral tone, a. The diacritic is placed over the letter that represents the syllable nucleus, unless that letter is missing. Tones are used in Hanyu Pinyin symbols, and they do not appear in Chinese characters.
Standard Chinese has many polysyllabic words. Like in other writing systems using the Latin alphabet, spacing in pinyin is usually based on word boundaries. However, there are often ambiguities in partitioning a word. The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography were put into effect in 1988 by the National Educational and National Language commissions.[37] These rules became a GB recommendation in 1996,[37][38] and were last updated in 2012.[39]
Pinyin is also not designed to transcribe Chinese language varieties other than Standard Chinese, which is based on the phonological system of Beijing Mandarin. Other romanization schemes have been devised to transcribe those other Chinese varieties, such as Jyutping for Cantonese and Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Hokkien.
Based on the "Chinese Romanization" section of ISO 7098:2015, pinyin tone marks should use the symbols from Combining Diacritical Marks, as opposed by the use of Spacing Modifier Letters in Bopomofo. Lowercase letters with tone marks are included in GB/T 2312 and their uppercase counterparts are included in JIS X 0212;[44] thus Unicode includes all the common accented characters from pinyin.[45] Other punctuation mark and symbols in Chinese are to use the equivalent symbol in English noted in to GB/T 15834.
The spelling of Chinese geographical or personal names in pinyin has become the most common way to transcribe them in English. Pinyin has also become the dominant method for entering Chinese text into computers in mainland China, in contrast to Taiwan, where bopomofo is most commonly used.
Families outside of Taiwan who speak Mandarin as a mother tongue use pinyin to help children associate characters with spoken words which they already know. Chinese families outside of Taiwan who speak some other language as their mother tongue use the system to teach children Mandarin pronunciation when they learn vocabulary in elementary school.[48][49]
Since 1958, pinyin has been actively used in adult education as well, making it easier for formerly illiterate people to continue with self-study after a short period of pinyin literacy instruction.[50]
Pinyin has become a tool for many foreigners to learn Mandarin pronunciation, and is used to explain both the grammar and spoken Mandarin coupled with Chinese characters. Books containing both Chinese characters and pinyin are often used by foreign learners of Chinese. Pinyin's role in teaching pronunciation to foreigners and children is similar in some respects to furigana-based books (with hiragana letters written above or next to kanji, directly analogous to zhuyin) in Japanese or fully vocalised texts in Arabic ("vocalised Arabic").
The tone-marking diacritics are commonly omitted in popular news stories and even in scholarly works, as well as in the traditional Mainland Chinese Braille system, which is similar to pinyin, but meant for blind readers.[51] This results in some degree of ambiguity as to which words are being represented.
Chinese text can be sorted by its pinyin representation, which is often useful for looking up words whose pronunciations are known, but not whose character forms are not known.[52] Chinese characters and words can be sorted for convenient lookup by their Pinyin expressions alphabetically,[53] according to their inherited order originating with the ancient Phoenicians. Identical syllables are then further sorted by tone number, ascending, with neutral tones placed last.
Singapore implemented Hanyu Pinyin as the official romanization system for Mandarin in the public sector starting in the 1980s, in conjunction with the Speak Mandarin Campaign.[59] Hanyu Pinyin is also used as the romanization system to teach Mandarin Chinese at schools.[60] While the process of Pinyinisation has been mostly successful in government communication, placenames, and businesses established in the 1980s and onward, it continues to be unpopular in some areas, most notably for personal names and vocabulary borrowed from other varieties of Chinese already established in the local vernacular.[59] In these situations, romanization continues to be based on the Chinese language variety it originated from, especially the three largest Chinese varieties traditionally spoken in Singapore (Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese).
The "ibus-m17n package" mentioned above did not work for me. I am in a VirtualBox Linux Mint 19.3 Virtual Machine running on Windows 10. I found "Rachel's Page", and went down to the section called "How to input Hànyǔ Pīnyīn with tones in Ibus?" I will quote,
The method you want is called "Chinese - hanyu pinyin (m17n)" in the Input Method menu; the icon is ā with the other tone marks next to it. Once this is activated, it's quite easy to type Hànyǔ Pīnyīn with tone marks. Just type the spelling (for example, "han"), then type the number of the tone (for example, "4"). It instantly puts the tone mark over the appropriate vowel -- no additional keystrokes needed. If you want to enter ü (a u with umlauts), use the old "v" trick."
If you have problems telling the tone of a character, apart from remembering the first tone is high and flat, the second rising, the third low (consider the half third tone), and the fourth falling, the most practical advice is perhaps to memorize four characters representing the four basic Mandarin tones as "model" characters. For example:
I created an Anki deck for every possible pinyin and tone from -learning-tools/Mandarin-Chinese-pronunciation-lesson/pinyin-chart-table. It has 444 different pinyin, meaning 1776 (444 * 4) total tone combinations. I struggle a lot with tones and this has been a significant help. Hopefully other beginners can find this useful.
Pinyin is an extremely useful tool and should be the foundation of your Chinese learning. Plus, it's not just for Chinese learners like yourself. Actually, all native Chinese speakers know pinyin - it's the first thing Chinese children learn at school before learning characters. So even if you don't know Chinese characters, you can type in pinyin and Chinese people will understand.
Every single sound that exists in Chinese can be displayed easily in a pinyin chart like the one above. Once you master these 409 sounds along with the tones, you'll have practically mastered the pronunciation of every single word in the Chinese language. And even better, if you know English you should already know how to correctly pronounce over half of those sounds without any coaching! As for the rest, that's what we're here for! We've built this interactive pinyin chart (above) with demonstrations for how to correctly pronounce every possible sound in the Chinese language. We've also created a series of video lessons (below) with practice tools that enable you to record yourself and listen back to it to ensure your pronunciation matches the examples. Combined with our Tone Pairs practice tool, you now have everything you need to master pinyin, tones, and Chinese pronunciation.
Good news: if you know English you should already know how to correctly pronounce over half of those sounds without any coaching! As for the rest, that's what we're here for. We've built this interactive pinyin chart (above) with demonstrations for how to correctly pronounce every possible sound in the Chinese language. We've also created a series of video lessons (below) with practice tools that enable you to record yourself and listen back to it to ensure your pronunciation matches the examples. Combined with our Tone Pairs practice tool, you now have everything you need to master pinyin and Chinese pronunciation.
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