Mandarin - Lesson #2

This week's lesson focused on pinyin and pronunciation.

In terms of pronunciation, we have initials, finals and syllables.

Syllables (which are words put together from initials and/or finals) can stand without initials but they MUST have a final. There are some rules in regards to spellings and letters being added in front of finals but I've not quite got my head around all that yet.

Initials - b p m f d t n l g k h

Finals - a o e i u ü ai ei ao ou

It took a while for me to get my head around how to sound these out, it's very different to English and they all have a very elongated sound in comparison. 

Here are some of the notes I made for myself to remember roughly how to sound these out.

Initials

b p m f - I likened the sound of these to 'wor' 

e.g. 'bwooor', 'pwooor'

d t n l g k h - I likened the sound of these to 'ugh' 

e.g. 'duuugh', 'tuuugh'

Finals

i - 'ee' (like in the Japanese word 'usagi')
ü - 'yu'
ai - 'aye' (I pronounce this like in Japanese also)
ei - 'A'
ao - 'oww'
ou - 'ohh'

Our teacher gave us a pinyin chart with lots of variations on with a link. On the website, there are sound functions which allow you to play the sound of each initial/ final/ syllable in all 4 tones. 

https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-pinyin-chart.php

These are things that I find helpful personally, hopefully they will also be of help to anyone else who is also learning Mandarin and find it tricky to remember or get their head around how to sound out the letters/ words!

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Which do you find the hardest to sound out?
Top tip - elongaaate!

- Part Time 小姐

大家好, Hello everyone!

Today I started my part time Mandarin course!

It was interesting to learn about the language itself, I didn't know that the language is actually called 'Hanyu' (language of the Han people) but this word doesn't exist in the English language.

Learning about the evolution of Chinese characters was also very interesting for me and I found I much prefer the look of traditional Chinese characters to their simplified form. We were also told we'd generally need to learn around 2000 simplified characters, I fear a little for how I'll get on but I hope knowing some traditional characters might help my cause.

[Image from: https://www.researchgate.net]

We started off with learning the different tones in Mandarin (there are 4 plus a neutral tone, compare to the 6 in Cantonese) and pinyin and I could clearly see how Mandarin is SO much easier for foreigners to learn than Cantonese.

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Overall I had a real field trip learning about my own culture and our writing system! I look forward to how I'll get on in the following weeks. 

- Part Time 小姐