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Hey guys, I told you I'd be back! So let's get down to business! When I started learning
Chinese, our teacher used to drill us, like really drill, the Chinese alphabet into us,
because she said it was a really important building block in our language, and she was
right! So for our first test we actually had to write out the entire alphabet from start
to finish! So we won't be making you do that, don't worry, but we will be introducing the
Chinese alphabet to you. The Chinese alphabet is also known as Pinyin, and Pinyin is a word
that literally means 'spell sound'- 'pin' is spell and 'yin' is sound. And they named
it that because Chinese is a character language, right? They don't actually have an alphabet.
But when they were trying to make it more accessible to foreigner learners, what they
did was they sat down and said each of their sounds and matched it to the closest alphabetic
letter that they could think of. And it actually does match up pretty closely; there are only
a couple of sounds that differ from what we have in English. And once you have them in
your head they're pretty easy to remember. So it really does make Chinese a lot easier
to learn, and you can even pick up patterns in it once you get to a certain point. I think
it's awesome and it is excellent and after this section you'll be on a good start! So
let's get started!