Introduction to Mandarin Chinese
While some in the West are under the assumption that the “Chinese language” is just Cantonese. The fact is, Cantonese is merely one of the eight major dialects spoken in China.
Different Chinese dialects have massively different pronunciations, even if they share the same written form.
The Northern dialect (which itself has many “sub-dialects” under it) is spoken by 70 percent of the population. Therefore, you could say that the standard language spoken in China is based on the Northern dialect. The name for this standard form is PuTongHua (common speech) in mainland China, GuoYu or HuaYu (national language) in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other overseas Chinese communities, and “Mandarin Chinese” in English-Speaking countries.
Other forms such as ZhongWen (Chinese) or HanYu (the Han language, Han Chinese makes up 93 percent of the Chinese population) are more formal names for Mandarin Chinese and are often used among Chinese language students. Native Chinese speakers often use the term ZhongWen rather than PuTongHua when they ask non-native Chinese speakers if they speak Chinese. Mandarin is taught in schools and spoken by television and radio presenters in mainland China; it is the dialect that is understood by most Chinese speakers.
Various systems have been devised for transcribing Chinese sounds into the Latin script. The most popular Chinese phonetics system is PinYin. PinYin uses 26 letters in total, 25 of which are English letters. The exception of v , which is replaced by ü. PinYin was adopted as the official Chinese phonetics system in the People’s Republic of China in 1958, and has since become a standard form used by news agencies as well as educational institutions. PinYin has now been adopted almost universally in the west for transliterating Chinese personal names and place names, although in older books you may still find earlier Romanization systems in use (e.g. Beijing is the official PinYin translation and Peking is the Wade-Giles translation). In mainland China, PinYin is used as a tool to teach the correct pronunciation of PuTongHua to children starting school. In dictionaries PinYin is given next to the character to indicate pronunciation. Many street signs in big cities in mainland China have PinYin directly underneath the Chinese characters to help with pronounciation.
Chinese is a vowel-dominated language. A syllable may consist of a single vowel, a compound vowel or a vowel preceded by a consonant. A compound vowel may consist of two vowels or vowel with a nasal sound, which is treated as one unit. This is probably why consonants are called initials (ShengMu) and vowels are called finals (YunMu) in Chinese.
We will go into Chinese pronunciation in-depth next week!
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