So what is pinyin?
Pinyin is a writing system for Mandarin Chinese, based on the latin alphabet, that uses letters to represent sounds. Just like in English, or Italian the letter <p> represents the sound /p/, the letter <r> represents the sound /r/, and so on.
“But wait!”, I hear you say. “The R-sounds in English and Italian sound very different from each other!” You are correct. Just like any other language that uses an alphabet, pinyin has to make choices for how to use these letters to best represent the sounds that exist in Modern Mandarin. As we will see, the Mandarin /r/ is pretty close in pronunciation to the “growly” English /r/, and not as similar to the Italian rolling /r/.
Let’s look at how to write the consonant sounds
Other letters that are used in a rather unique way in pinyin are the letters, and letter combinations:
s, c, z
sh, ch, zh
x, q, j
The logic behind this table is that each row consists of a fricative; an aspirated affricate; and an unaspirated affricate. These are linguists’ jargon for different kinds of sounds, and you really don’t have to learn what they mean.
Another way of saying the same thing is that the leftmost sounds (s, sh, x) all are continuous, just like /s/ in English. The middle sounds (c, ch, q) all begin with a T-sound, and the rightmost sounds (z, zh, j) begin with a D-sound.
Pay attention to the fact that X which stands for the combination of two consonant sounds in English (KS) represents only one sound in Mandarin. On the other hand, C, and Z, Q, and J, all represent double-consonant combinations. I’m not gonna try to spell them out in “English” here, it’s better to use your ear to pick up their sounds, more on this below.
This is not a strictly correct explanation of Mandarin phonology in any way, but we don’t learn such things from text anyway, we learn primarily them by listening, and later by repeating and by speaking.
Wikipedia has made this nice color-coded diagram that highlights the connections between the different “series” of sounds. The yellows share a common sound, as do the light blues, and the purples.
Now on to writing the vowel sounds
I mentioned above, while talking about the consonants, that some single letters in pinyin represent double sounds in Mandarin. There’s something similar going on with how pinyin writes vowel sounds. Mandarin has a number of triphthongs, that is, three-vowel combinations. These are sometimes written with three letters, such as:
uai, as in kuài (eng. fast, quick)
iao, as in piào (eng. ticket)
But sometimes pinyin uses only two letters to represent three vowels:
ui, as in duì (duèi) (eng. correct)
iu, as in liù (liòu) (eng. six)
In the same way some diphthongs, that is double-vowel sounds, are written with only one vowel letter:
u, as in lún (luén / lwén) (eng. wheel)
Conversely pinyin sometimes uses two letters to represent one vowel sound when there is no preceding consonant letter:
yi, as in yī (ī) (eng. one)
wu, as in wǔ (ǔ) (eng. five)
yu, as in yǔ (ǚ) (eng. rain)
These are just some quirks of spelling that pinyin has, just like any other alphabetic system (except maybe Finnish and Turkish, maybe).
But as I said, these things are best learned by ear. So I recommend you to head over to Yoyo Chinese and play around with their nice interactive pinyin chart that lets you listen to how the letters sound in the context of syllables.
And the tones!
Many languages that use the alphabet have adapted it to some degree to suit the sounds of that language. French uses diacritic marks to mark a difference between two E-sounds, namely the narrow É and the open È. Mandarin does the same, it uses diacritic marks to indicate the 4 main tones of Mandarin, and an unmarked vowel indicates the 5th neutral tone, like this:
ā, á, ǎ, à, a
ē, é, ě, è, e
And so on. We have already seen these in use in the examples used above.
Wrap-up
That’s it! That’s pinyin. Over-all pinyin is a very straight-forward sound-based spelling system. Sure, it has its quirks, but nothing too big all things considered.
My tip is to go over this blog post to get an overview of the pinyin writing system, but don’t try to memorize it. Just get a general understanding of it. What’s important to do next is to go and find beginner’s material and use it to learn from a real text, even if it is a text that has been adapted to a beginner’s level. Often these texts will be written in characters, for at the end of the day, all intermediate to advanced texts in Mandarin are, but the pronunciation will be indicated using pinyin. Pinyin might be the king of written Mandain, but characters are the emperor. But they work well together.
It makes texts immediately understandable
As beginners, using these writing systems side by side is really the way to go. The first few months we don’t need to actively focus on characters at all. The most common ones that you keep seeing will probably get stuck in your memory anyway, and as for the more advanced ones, you’ll get there in due time. But at first, just use pinyin as a way to help you make texts understandable from the get-go. Once comprehension kicks in, the rest will follow. Have fun!
