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This page contains a course in the Chinese Alphabet, pronunciation and sound of each letter as well as a list of other lessons in grammar topics and common expressions in Chinese also called Mandarin.
Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters.
To help, in this post, I’ll provide a broad introduction to the Chinese alphabet, explaining how it works, where it comes from and why you need to learn it. By the end, hopefully, I’ll also convince you that learning to read and write Chinese is not as hard as its reputation suggests.
The Chinese phonetic alphabet is also known colloquially as bopomofo, after its first four letters: bo, po, mo, and fo, just like in English we sometimes refer to the alphabet “the ABCs.” There are two main systems of writing the Chinese alphabet.
What is the Chinese Alphabet? Chinese utilizes a logographic writing system instead of an alphabet, with characters that stand for ideas and concepts rather than sounds. Chinese speakers do, however, also employ a system known as pinyin (拼音 pīn yīn), which is quite close to a Chinese alphabet.
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language.
Jan 31, 2020 · Learn the Chinese Alphabet in Less Than 20 min! Pinyin & Zhuyin (Bopomofo) Sing and Learn Chinese. 39.5K subscribers. 35K. 1.3M views 4 years ago.
