One important aspect of Mandarin language is the “Pinyin”, which means “phonetic notation” or “phonetic symbols”. Romanization is to represent phonemic notation and transcription of standard Mandarin by Roman script. While Pinyin has always been part of Mandarin language, the standardized Romanization system of Pinyin was introduced by the Chinese government only in the last century.

 

International Mandarin Pinyin System

 

Prior to Pinyin there were several Romanization systems and the need for standardization was imminent so as to unify the Mandarin language. There were extensive discussions and consultations on the standardization the final version was eventually approved in 1958 in the People’s Republic of China.

Official International adoption came 20 years later in 1979 when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as the standard Romanization for modern Chinese. Since then Pinyin was accepted by many international bodies, including the Government of Singapore, the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and other international institutions as the preferred transcription system for Mandarin.

 

Study Mandarin By Pinyin

 

To study Mandarin, one has to first learn Pinyin. Although Pinyin uses the same alphabets as English language, many of the alphabets deviate slightly from their English counterparts in pronunciation. In English alphabet system, a word is made up by a combination of vowels and consonants. In similar manner, Mandarin Pinyin represents a word by an Initial and a Final, both represent a Pinyin sound. The pronunciation of a Chinese character is therefore the combined sound of its initial and final.

An Initial can be either single alphabet of double alphabet. For example: the initial “s” is single alphabet while the initial “sh” is double alphabet. There are total of 21 Initials, each representing one unique Pinyin sound. There are another 37 sounds representing the finals. From the 2 sets of Initial and Final, a total of 420 different sound combination can be form.

To study Mandarin correctly, one also has to be able to pronounce the Mandarin character with proper tone. The “tone” of a word describes how the pitch of the speaker’s voice changes as the word is said. Words in Mandarin that have the same pronunciation can have different meanings depending on how the word is said. There are four “tones” in Mandarin and they are represented by marks above the Pinyin.