How to Read Pinyin

From Wikipedia.com

Pinyin (Simplified / Traditional Chinese:拼音), or more formally Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音 / 漢語拼音), is currently the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hànyǔ (汉语 / 漢語) means the Chinese language, and Pīnyīn (拼音) means "phonetics", or more literally, "spelling sound" or "spelled sound".[1] The system is now used in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, parts of Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore to teach Mandarin Chinese[2] and internationally to teach Mandarin as a second language. It is also often used to spell Chinese names in foreign publications and can be used to enter Chinese characters (hanzi) on computers and cellphones.

The romanization system was developed by a government committee in the People's Republic of China (PRC), and approved by the Chinese government on February 11, 1958.[3] The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as the international standard in 1982,[4] and since then it has been adopted by many other organizations. This romanization system also became the national standard in the Republic of China (ROC, commonly known as Taiwan) on January 1, 2009.[5][6]

Overview

In some regions, text on road signs appears both in Hanzi and in Pinyin

The correspondence between Roman letter and sound in the system is sometimes idiosyncratic, though not necessarily more so than the way the Roman alphabet is employed in other languages. For example, the aspiration distinction between b, d, g and p, t, k is similar to that of English, but not to that of French. Z and c also have that distinction; however, they are pronounced as [ts], as in German and Italian, which do not have that distinction. From s, z, c come the digraphs sh, zh, ch by analogy with English sh, ch. Although this introduces the novel combination zh, it is internally consistent in how the two series are related, and reminds the trained reader that many Chinese pronounce sh, zh, ch as s, z, c. In the x, j, q series, the Pinyin use of x is similar to its use in Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Basque and Maltese; and the Pinyin q is akin to its value in Albanian; both Pinyin and Albanian pronunciations may sound similar to the ch to the untrained ear. Pinyin vowels are pronounced in a similar way to vowels in Romance languages. More information on the pronunciation of all pinyin letters in terms of English approximations is given further below.

The pronunciation and spelling of Chinese words are generally given in terms of initials and finals, which represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language, rather than letter by letter. Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), the nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant).

Initials and finals

Unlike in European languages, initials (simplified Chinese: 声母; traditional Chinese: 聲母; pinyin: shēngmǔ) and finals (simplified Chinese: 韵母; traditional Chinese: 韻母; pinyin: yùnmǔ)—and not consonants and vowels—are the fundamental elements in pinyin (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Han language). Nearly each Chinese syllable can be spelled with exactly one initial followed by one final, except in the special syllable er and when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable (see below). The latter case, though a common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications. One exception is the city Harbin (simplified Chinese: 哈尔滨; traditional Chinese: 哈爾濱), which is from the Manchu language originally.

Even though most initials contain a consonant, finals are not simple vowels, especially in compound finals (simplified Chinese: 复韵母; traditional Chinese: 複韻母; pinyin: fuyunmu), i.e., when one "final" is placed in front of another one. For example, [i] and [u] are pronounced with such tight openings that some native Chinese speakers (especially when singing or on stage) pronounce yī (simplified Chinese: 衣; traditional Chinese: 衣, clothes, officially pronounced /i/) as /ji/, wéi (simplified Chinese: 围; traditional Chinese: 圍, to enclose, officially as /uei/) as /wei/ or /wuei/. The concepts of consonant and vowel are not incorporated in pinyin or its predecessors; there is no list of consonants or vowels.

Initials

In each cell below, the first line indicates the IPA, the second indicates pinyin.

¹ /ɻ/ may phonetically be /ʐ/ (a voiced retroflex fricative). This pronunciation varies among different speakers, and is not two different phonemes.
² the letters "w" and "y" are not included in the table of initials in the official pinyin system. They are an orthographic convention for the medials "i", "u" and "ü" when no initial is present. When "i", "u" or "ü" are finals and no initial is present, they are spelled "yi", "wu", and "yu", respectively.
³ "y" is pronounced [ɥ] before "u".

Conventional order (excluding w and y), derived from the zhuyin system, is:

Finals

In each cell below, the first line indicates IPA, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone (no-initial) form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. Other than finals modified by an -r, which are omitted, the following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals.¹

The only syllable-final consonants in standard Mandarin are -n and -ng, and -r, which is attached as a grammatical suffix. Chinese syllables ending with any other consonant is either from a non-Mandarin language (southern Chinese languages such as Cantonese, or minority languages of China), or it indicates the use of a non-pinyin Romanization system (where final consonants may be used to indicate tones).

¹ [ɑɻ] (而, 二, etc.) is written er. For other finals formed by the suffix -r, pinyin does not use special orthography; one simply appends -r to the final that it is added to, without regard for any sound changes that may take place along the way. For information on sound changes related to final -r, please see Standard Mandarin.
² "ü" is written as "u" after j, q, x, or y.
³ "uo" is written as "o" after b, p, m, or f.
⁴ It is pronounced [ʊŋ] when it follows an initial, and pinyin reflects this difference.

Technically, i, u, ü without a following vowel are finals, not medials, and therefore take the tone marks, but they are more concisely displayed as above. In addition, ê [ɛ] (欸, 誒) and syllabic nasals m (呒, 呣), n (嗯, 唔), ng (嗯,