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Chinese has pinyin as its pronunciation system that represents hanzi (Chinese characters). Most of the pinyin contains an initial (the consonant that begins the syllable) and a final (the rest of the syllable). For instead, word h ǎ o ( 好 ) is composed of ‘h’ as the initial and ‘ ǎ o’ as the final. A syllable that has an initial automatically also has a final. On the other side, some words do not have an initial, such as ài ( 爱 , love) and è ( 饿 , hungry). In learning pinyin, we do not only pay attention in the tone, but also the pronunciation. b : The initial ‘b’ is pronounced with unaspirated ‘p’, as in ‘lap’. Example: bāo ( 包 , package), it is pronounced /pao/ with a flat tone. p : The initial ‘p’ has the same way as when we pronounce ‘p’ in word “sport’. There is an aspirated ‘p’. Example: pàng ( 胖 , fat/chubby), it is pronounced /phang/ with a falling tone. m : The initial ‘m’ is similar to ‘m’ in the English “mango”. There is no change to pronounce this init

As you might know, tone is one of the most important aspects of learning Chinese. It affects the meaning of a word. For a reminder, there are five tones in Chinese. The first tone is ˉ, it means that you have to pronounce it flatly. The second tone is ˊ , you need to raise the tone to pronounce the pinyin. The third tone is ˇ, the pinyin is pronounced in the falling-rising tone. The fourth tone is ˋ , you must stress the pinyin that has this mark above it. The last one is neutral tone as the fifth tone that pronounced soft and short. It has no mark above the pinyin. There are several rules in writing the tone and pronouncing the words. Tone Position The tone mark is placed above the vowel sound if the syllable only has a single vowel. Example: m ǎ ( 马 , horse), nà ( 那 , that), and k ǔ ( 苦 , bitter). The tone mark is placed above the vowel that pronounced more loudly and clearly if the syllable has more than one vowel. Example: h ǎ o ( 好 , good) and xián ( 咸 , salty

Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. However, many people are interested in learning this language. If you are one of them, there are several things you have to know before learning Chinese. Hànzì VS Pīnyīn What is hànzì? What is pīnyīn? What is the difference between them? If you are someone who learns Mandarin for the first time, you will find these two terms. As you might already know that Chinese does not use the alphabet in its writing but strokes, those strokes refer to as Hànzì; while Pīnyīn is letters of the alphabet that refer to how to read hànzì. Most pīnyīn are written above hànzì. Currently,  hànzì is divided into two types, namely traditional hànzì and simplified hànzì. The Chinese government officially simplified traditional Hànzì so that reading skills in Chinese increase. However, there are still some countries that use traditional Hànzì, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. Tone In Chinese, tone is called as shēngdiào (声调)