KiVAKO: Chinese 1 and Chinese Characters 1, 5op
What is pinyin
The pronunciation of Chinese characters has been written with Latin letters since 1956, when the so-called Pinyin System was officially invented. The Chinese word Pinyin means “spelling language”. It is used mainly to teach spoken Chinese. In fact, if a foreigner only wants to learn how to speak Chinese, he really doesn’t need to spend time learning Chinese characters at all; the simple Pinyin System is adequate to help him to master spoken Chinese.
Although Pinyin is already a complete “spelling language” for writing Standard Chinese speech, in China it is not yet regarded as a written language system. Up till now, it has only been used as a tool to learn spoken Chinese and new Chinese characters.
The vowels and consonants of Pinyin
Vowels:
a o e i u ü
Consonants:
b p m f d t n l g
k h j q x z c s zh
ch sh r