Pinyin: the romanization and phonetic system for Mandarin Chinese

Since the Chinese characters almost always describe exactly one syllable, the pinyin transcription is also syllable-based. The Chinese syllable consists of an initial sound and a final sound. The syllable ba consists of the initial sound b and the final sound a. Most final sounds can also be pronounced without an initial sound. Since the Chinese and the German phonetic system differ in some points considerably, the pronunciation notes are only approximations. The second column shows the pronunciation according to the International PhoneticAlphabet (IPA) based on Lee & Zee, Duanmu and Lin.

Anlaute

Loud

Each final sound consists of up to three components:

• Glide: - , i, u, ü
• Central sound: - , a, e/o
• Final sound: - , i, u, n, ng

Not all combinations are realized, and there are certain sound shifts (see phonetic transcription). In addition, there is the syllable er, which does not fit into this scheme.

The final sounds are spelled differently depending on the initial sound:

• After j, q, x and y, the dots above the ü are dropped. A written u after these sounds is therefore pronounced as ü;
• The pronouns uei, uen and iou are written after the initial sound as ui, un and iu;
• For syllables without an anlaut, i, u, ü are replaced at the beginning by y, w, yu. The syllables i, in, ing and u are written as yi, yin, ying and wu;
• After z, c, s, zh, ch, sh and r, i denotes "pressed" vowels in the throat ("it gets stuck in your throat") - written here as "-i" (top left of the table).

Matrix of all syllables

In the following table, all syllables of High Chinese are listed according to initial and final sound. The sorting is done phonetically, not according to the writing. That is:

• if j, q, x, y is followed by the "ü" sound, the syllable is in the corresponding line, although in this case "u" is written without dots;
• the line with the "ong" pronunciation is in the u group, because in this case "ung" is pronounced;
• the syllables with [ɻ̩] and [ɹ̩] are in the line for the final sound "-i", separated from the line "i";
• "w", "y" and "yu" are in the column for syllables without an anlaut (∅), because they are spelling variants of the glide vowels "u", "i", "ü".

The syllable yai occurs in the high-level variant of the Republic of China, but not in the variant of the People's Republic of China. Only syllables occurring in the vocabulary of dialects are bracketed.

Except for er, all these syllables in High Chinese and increasingly in Beijing pronunciation can have an -r appended to them, which often greatly changes the pronunciation and causes tonal differences between otherwise clearly separated syllables to disappear, but this is not taken into account in the pinyin transcription. In addition, there is the interjection ê as well as interjections with syllabic nasals (hm, hng, m, n, ng). Interjections cannot be extended by -r.

In polysyllabic words, when a syllable begins with an a, e, or o, it must always be separated from the preceding syllable by an apostrophe. Examples are the city names Xi'an (西安, Xī'ān) and Chang'an (長安 / 长安, Cháng'ān) or the words tian'e (天鵝 / 天鹅, tiān'é - "swan") and hai'ou (海鷗 / 海鸥, hǎi'ōu - "seagull"). Without hyphenation, these cities would be read as xian (one syllable) and chan-gan. Before the other vowels (i, u, ü), such a rule is not necessary because they are written at the beginning of the syllable as y, w, yu - so the y and the w already mark the syllable boundary. To improve the flow of reading, the apostrophe is also placed where there is no danger of confusion (tiane cannot be read tia-ne because the syllable tia does not exist in High Chinese; neither can haiou be pronounced as one syllable).