Summary of Chinese Pinyin

Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet is the national standard for Chinese Pinyin and is also the international standard stipulated by the United Nations for spelling Chinese special terms and names of persons and places.

Chinese Pinyin is a kind of tool used for spelling Chinese characters.  It includes Shengmu (consonants) and Yunmu (vowels).  The details will be explained in the following courses.

Learning Chinese Pinyin is a necessary step for learning Chinese.  It helps you in mastering the standard pronunciation of Chinese characters.  After mastering Chinese Pinyin, you may read the Chinese books with Pinyin marked, learn Chinese characters by looking in the dictionary and thus enter a new world of learning Chinese.

The structure of Chinese characters is complicated.  It includes pictographic characters, pictophonetic characters and combined meaning characters.  For example, the character "口" is a pictographic character.  Does it look like a mouth? But how to read it? You can read it in Pinyin: kou.  And with the tone added, you may read this character.  And to say "thank you" in Chinese, you may pronounce the word according to its Pinyin: Xièxie.

Now you see how important Pinyin is for learning Chinese.