How do you pronounce the words ‘can’ and ‘women’ in Chinese?
If you are conversant in English, chances are that you would pronounce them the English way. Unfortunately, the proper pronunciations happen to be quite different. The word ‘can’ is pronounced in a manner similar to ‘chan’, and ‘women’, ‘wuo mern’.
It is, therefore, helpful if you can have some understanding of how the Chinese phonetics works, before you start learning Chinese. This will save you time, and probably also embarrassment.
Here are four points that you will need to know about Chinese phonetics.
First of all, Chinese have developed systems to notate the sounds of Chinese words, they are Romain-letters. There is more than one system around, but you don’t need to konw all of them. Hanyu pinyin which means phonetics of the Chinese language is the most popular among them, it has been widely recognized and accepted by the Chinese government and organizations like ISO.
It is safe for you to begin to learn Chinese with only the Hanyu pinyin system.
Second, the Roman-letters of the Chinese phonetics do not follow the English convention. The Roman-letters may be pronounced quite differently although it also uses the alphabet. This is the reason why ‘women’ is not pronounced as the ‘women’ which you are familiar with, and ‘can’ is not pronounced as the ‘can’ you know.
Third, the Chinese phonetics can be grouped into consonants and vowels as well – just like English. The good news is that many of them are similar to the sounds of English. For example, b is pronounced more or less like ‘b’ of ball, and t is similar to ‘t’ of turf. As a result, if you can isolate the consonants vowels that the distinctively different from that of English, giving them prior attention, you would get the hard nuts to be cracked first, and speed up your learning process.
Forth, pinyin is a wonderful tool to help you start learning Mandarin Chinese.
Chinese is written in characters rather than alphabet. So it is pretty difficult for many to recognize the words and commit them to memory. This can be a great huddle from the language learning points of view. You may focus only on the pronunciation with the help of pinyin, and do away with the characters. This makes the learning process so much less intimidating.
Howerver, it is important for you to understand that pinyin cannot replace the roles of the Chinese characters, althogh it can be a convenient tool to help you get started. This is because there are simply too many Chinese words sharing same pronunciation. For example, the pinyin ‘siren’ can refer to both the words for ‘private’ and ‘dead body’. Thear are large quantities of other similar examples. It is simply too confusing to rely on pinyin alone for written communication!
It is, therefore, important for you to know that if you are serious about Learning Chinese, you will have to learn the Chinese characters eventually.
Therefore, when you are learning a new word, you should always find out the Chinese characters whenever possible. You may just have an idea of what they are at the beginning. If you have to learn the characters eventually, it will make the process much easier.
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