#Chinese vocabulary builder pinyin audio how to#

The table below illustrates the structure of sentences that express conditions. Mandarin does have a verb that is similar to “is”, which we will learn in the 3rd lesson. It is interesting to note that they do not contain any form of the verb “is”. SentencesĪll the sentences in this lesson describe conditions: good, bad, busy, not busy. Although every pattern has exceptions, recognizing the language patterns improves our feel for the language. In contrast, this courseware will display the spoken form at all times, so you don’t have to guess about the pronunciation.

#Chinese vocabulary builder pinyin audio how to#

Unfortunately, all books published with pinyin use the written form and let you figure out how to say it. For example “nǐ hǎo” (the written form) is normally pronounced “ní hǎo” (the spoken form). When two 3rd tone syllables occur in sequence, the first syllable is usually pronounced with a 2nd tone. Particle, used to request more information.Įxpression, taken separately the characters mean “again” “meet”. Note: wǒ can be used as a subject (“I”) or an object (“me”). However this courseware does, in order to make the expected pronunciation more clear.Īdjective, generally indicating a positive quality. Standard text books do not show spoken tone. There are just three types of tone change, which will be explained later. This is called tone change, or “spoken tone”. Some words will take a different tone depending on the tone of the word that follows. So, unless you have a musician’s ear, it is a good idea to memorize the tone when you learn a word. Missing the tone generally confuses your listener. If you use the wrong tone, you said the wrong word. The table below illustrates how tones change the meaning of words that sound like “ma”. Tone marks are placed above the vowels as guide to pronunciation. Mandarin is a tonal language, where “tone” is actually a change in pitch that occurs during the pronunciation of a syllable.

Once you master these 409 sounds, you can pronounce any word in Mandarin. Compared to more than 5000 English syllables, this is a small number. Mandarin has only 409 distinct syllables. In addition to pronunciation, learning pinyin has other benefits as well: such as Looking up words in a dictionary and typing Chinese characters on a keyboard or mobile phone Tones Using a phonetic representation, instead of characters, makes this easier to achieve. The main goal of the first ten lessons is learn pronunciation.