Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world. It is spoken by about 870 million people as a first language. An additional 180 million or so people speak Mandarin as a second language. The total number of speakers is over 1 billion, double that of English speakers. Mandarin Chinese is the official language of mainland China, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also one of the five official languages used by the United Nations


A Brief Introduction to
Romanized spelling system of Chinese - Pinyin

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The phonological system of the modern standard
language in Chinese, Putonghua or Guoyu, can be represented by letters.
Of all the letters of English alphabet, 25 letters are used for Pinyin.
Letter 'v' is not used, while letter 'ü'
is added to represent the vowel sound 'yu'.

Consonant letters

There are 20 consonant letters
use in Putonghua. Letter 'V' is not used. Three consonants are represented by
combinations of two letters - 'zh', 'ch' and 'sh':

b	p	m	f
d	t	n	l
g	k	h
j	q	x
z	c	s
zh	ch	sh	r
y	w

Note:

• 
  The actual sound you hear for each letter is a combination of the consonant
  and a vowel.
• 
  'y' and 'w' are used for 'i' and 'u' respectively if they appear at the
  beginning of a syllable: e.g. 'ya [ia]' 'wa [ua]'. Or they are added
  when 'i' and 'u' are independent syllables, e.g. 'yi [i]', 'wu [u]'

Vowel letters

There are 6 vowel letters used
in Putonghua:

a

o

e

i

u

ü

Tones

There are four tones in Putonghua:
the 1st tone, the 2nd tone, the 3rd tone and the 4th tone. They are superimposed
over the main vowel of a syllable and represented by diacritic markers.

yllables

Syllables are composed by consonants, vowels and
tone. According to the trational notation, a syllable is composed by a
'initial' and a 'final'. An initial is the first sound of a syllable, usually,
a consonant. A final is the rest part of the syllable. The final can be
a single vowel, or a combination of vowels, or combination of vowels and
nasals 'n' or 'ng': For example: (the following syllables are not human
voice, they are produced by Bell-lab automatic speech synthecizing program)

Single vowel	a, i, u
Combination of vowels	ao, ia
Combination of a vowel and a nasal	an, en, in, ang, eng, ing
Combination of vowels and a nasal	uan, uang, iong
Combination of consonant and a vowel	wǒ, nǐ, tā
Combination of consonant, vowel and consonant	nín, lán, mén, lín
Other possible combinations	nóng, zhōng, chuān

This article was used with permission from:
Dr. Tim Xie
Dept. of Asian and Asian American Studies
California State University, Long Beach