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Hello everyone. I am Jan Cutforth and I am the Chinese teacher. I am here to talk to you about "What is Pinyin?" This is an introcduction to Chinese phonics.
What is Pinyin? Pinyin is a romaincized system used to represent Chinese characters.
Basically in the beginning, Chinese began as a set of pictographs. The sun, moon and the heart and over time these pictographs became much more structured.
So you can see the sun is the word "ri" and the progression from the simple pictograph to the more formalizaed one. We also have the moon, which is "yue" and people, which is "ren"
And "ren" comes from the pictorgraph for a heart.
Now, pinyin is made up of three basic elements. There are initial sounds, final sounds and a tone.
There are 21 initial sound and you see them listed here in the chart. If I were to say them, you would have: bo, po, mo, fo, de te, ne le, ge, ke, he, ji, qi, xi, zhi, chi, ***, ri, zi, ci, si.
Now, I know there look like American alphabetic letters, but their sounds are slightly different.
There are also finals.
Now the basic finals are a, o, e, i, u, u,
and you can have combinations of those finals like
ai, an, ang, ao, ei, en, eng, er
ie, in, ing, iu, ong, ou
and so forth
Now, in Chinese there are also four basic tones. So unlike in English where you can say a word however you chose or intend to say it, In Chinese, your tone will change the meaning of that word.
There is a flat tone that is high and level: ba.
There is a second tone, which starts at the middle and rises to the top: ba.
There is a third tone that starts low, dips and goes back up: ba.
And then there is a fourth tone that starts at the top and then goes down: ba.
Now, in order to make a word, you take and initial, you add a final and you add a tone. And the three of those make a Chinese character. Now, you do understand that you can have
many different variations. If I want the beginning sound of "m" and the final sound of "a", I have "ma"
I can also have four different words with that same initial and final because of the four different tones.
OK, so here you have the word "ma". The first tone, "ma1" would mean mother.
However, if I said "ma2",
I now mean hemp.
If I use the third tone with the same pinyin, I have "ma3" which means horse. And the fourth tone with the exact same pinyin would be "ma4" would mean to scold or yell at.
So, I want you to repeat after me.
ma, ma, ma, ma
good basically what you've done
is said the question particle "ma" four times.
Now, on the other hand, if we say it this way: ma1 ma1 ma4 ma3. I now said "mother scolds the horse."
A little different, and you kind of do not want to mess those up. So tones, initials and finals are very important in Chinese phonics. Thank You.