Chinese For Dummies (6 page)

Starting off with initials

In Chinese, initials always consist of consonants.
Table 1-2
lists the initials you encounter in the Chinese language.

Listen to these sounds on the accompanying audio tracks as you practice pronouncing initials. (Track 2)

Table 1-2 Chinese Initials

The initials
-n
and
-r
in
Table 1-2
can also appear as part of finals, so don't be surprised if you see them in
Table 1-3
, where I list finals.

Ending with finals

Chinese boasts many more consonants than vowels. In fact, the language has only six vowels all together:
a, o, e, i, u,
and
ü.
If you pronounce the vowels in sequence, your mouth starts off very wide and your tongue starts off very low. Eventually, when you get to
ü,
your mouth becomes much more closed and your tongue ends pretty high. You can also combine the vowels in various ways to form compound vowels.
Table 1-3
lists the vowels and some possible combinations, which comprise all the finals in Chinese.

Table 1-3 Chinese Finals

Tone marks in
pīnyīn
always appear above the vowel, but if you see a couple of vowels in a row, the tone mark appears above the first vowel in that sequence. One exception is when you see the vowels
iu
and
ui
together. In that case, the tone mark falls on the second vowel.

Sometimes vowels appear without initial consonant accompaniment, but they still mean something. The word
ǎi
矮
, meaning
short
(of stature), is one example.

Perfect pitch: Presenting the four tones

Mee meeeee (cough cough)! Pardon me. I'm getting carried away with warming up before I get into the four tones. Just think of the tones this way: They can be your best friends when it comes to being understood in Chinese, and they're the hip part of this ancient language.

If you combine all the possible initial sounds of Chinese with all the possible permutations of the final sounds, you come up with only about 400 sound combinations — not nearly enough to express all the ideas in your head. If you add the four basic tones of Mandarin to the mix, the number of possible permutations increases fourfold. Tones are also a great way to reduce the number of homophones in Chinese. Even so, any given syllable with a specific tone can often have more than one meaning. Sometimes, the only way to decipher the intended meaning is to see the written word.

Mandarin has only four tones. The best way to imagine what each of the four tones sounds like is to visualize these short descriptions:

First tone:
High level. The first tone is supposed to be as high as your individual pitch range can be without wavering. It appears like this above the letter
a:
ā.

Second tone:
Rising. The second tone sounds like you're asking a question. It goes from the middle level of your voice to the top. It doesn't automatically indicate that you're asking a question, however — it just sounds like you are. It appears like this above the letter
a:
á.