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| “Pinyin is a way to represent Chinese characters and express the sounds in the Chinese language using the alphabet. There are other systems to express Mandarin, but Pinyin is the most accepted and widely used. Once you learn Pinyin you will know how to pronounce any word in Mandarin using a Chinese dictionary. Pinyin is also the most common way to input Chinese characters into a computer. Although Pinyin and English both use the Roman alphabet, many letters are not expressed with the same sounds that English uses.” |
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This website provides an excellent introduction to Pinyin. In fact, our overview of Pinyin above is borrowed from their website. If you're new to Chinese and don't know anything about Pinyin, this is the best place to start.
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Professor John Jinghua put together this excellent Chinese Phonetics page where you can hear the proper pronunciations associated with different Chinese syllables (combination of initials and finals), as well as their different tones.
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This website provides a set of quizzes to test your understanding of Pinyin initials, finals, and tones. The interface is very clean and definitely worth a look.
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The Ocrat pages provide a couple of useful Chinese tools, including a library of animated pictures to help you learn Chinese stroke order, and a Chinese phonetics table to help with pronunciation.
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