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Just like any language, Chinese has a set of phonetics, or ’sounds’. According to Antimoon.com’s The sounds of English and the International Phonetic Alphabet page, English has 44 distinct sounds. Chinese, with only 37 sounds, should be easier to pronounce than English (well, perhaps not, but we’ll tackle the difficult stuff later). Fortunately for English speakers, Chinese shares many of the same phonetic sounds with English, making the pronunciation of many Mandarin words really simple. Where English speakers have the International Phonetic Alphabet, Chinese speakers have the ‘bopomo’ system of Mandarin Phonetic symbols. These 37 symbols cover all the possible sounds of Mandarin Chinese. Once you can pronounce them all, you can, in theory, pronounce any Chinese word, too.

There are actually two systems for representing Chinese phonetics. The ‘bopomo’ system I just mentioned, uses special simple Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Mandarin. The ‘pinyin’ system tries to do the same thing, using the Roman alphabet (which is the normal A-Z alphabet Westerners are used to). ‘pinyin’ and ‘bopomo’ both have their fans, and there is a bit of a ‘holy war’ among Chinese students as to which system is better. I’m a fan of the ‘bopomo’ system, because I found that the strange new symbols really allowed my brain to switch into ‘Chinese mode’ and not apply any English phonetic rules to the new language I was learning.

However, I realise that learning 37 sounds and symbols isn’t easy (it took me quite a while), and because this blog is focussed on simple, practical Chinese, I won’t expect anyone to be familiar with the 37 bopomo symbols. What I will do instead is include the bopomo symbols, and my own version of ‘Pinyin’ because I’ve always felt that the current version is absolutely useless, and unnecessarily difficult.

So.. next up, the 37 sounds of Mandarin Chinese in an easy to learn format…