Chinese Alphabet in photos

Chinese does not have an alphabet in the sense that we know it in the West. Chinesecharacters are not really letters, they are characters that represent concepts and ideas. Enjoy these images. If you need to learn how to type Chinese with your English/American keyboard, visit my other blog: How to type Chinese  Please subscribe to my blog. I enjoy publishing useful material to my viewers.

Naomi

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Naomi C.

My first language was French, then I learned Italian, and then Spanish. After learning three Romance languages I realized that I needed to learn something completely different. So I started learning Mandarin Chinese. I have not taken any classes yet. Right now I am teaching myself Chinese. Please visit any of my blogs entitled Dawdling Along In Mandarin. Thank you very much for visiting this blog. Your views mean a great deal to me.

With much love,

Naomi

Chinese Characters

Beautiful Script

Learning Chinese:

 In modern Chinese there is a set of more than 400 syllables, made of two elements: an initial, the sheng and a final the yun. The first part, the sheng is the consonant that begins a syllable. The sheng is followed by a yun that is usually a vowel. The Chinese computerized fonts for words processor include 6500 characters for the simplified form. These are different Chinese symbols:

Pinyin is a Chinese system for transliterating Mandarin Chinese into 25 European characters (the letter “v” is not included).
In Chinese, each character corresponds to one syllable (which corresponds to a part of an English word, and entire word or more than one word). Chinese syllables consist of three elements: initial sound, final sound and tone. The initial sounds are consonants and the final sounds contain at least one vowel. Some syllables consist only of an initial sound or a final sound.
Note that "c", "ch", "j", "q", "r", "sh", "x", "z" and "zh" are spelt differently.

In Chinese (Mandarin) there are 21 initial sounds: b, c, ch, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, sh, t, x, z, zh
In Chinese (Mandarin) there are 35 final sounds:
6 simple finals: a, e, i, o, u, ü
13 compound finals: ai, ao, ei, ia, iao, ie, iou, ou, ua, uai, üe, uei, uo
16 nasal finals: 8 front nasals: an, en, ian, in, uan, üan, uen, ün
                       8 back nasals: ang, eng, iang, ing, iong, ong, uang, ueng
Additional syllables in Mandarin Chinese: 5 special cases: er, hm, hng, ng, ~r

The initial and final sounds make a total of 56 basic sounds. Combinations of initials and finals plus the special cases result in 411 possible combinations. Applying the four tones of Mandarin Chinese to this, we get a total of around 1,600 unique syllables.