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Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...
Sometimes, different Chinese characters are used to express the same meaning in Cantonese and Mandarin. If you use the one commonly used in Cantonese to express the same meaning when you are speaking or writing Mandarin, a native speaker may be confused or even find it difficult to understand, and vice versa.
When a group uses a translated name, the Chinese characters should always be included, because there is not always a 1:1 correspondence of terms between Chinese and English. For example, the People's Republic of China uses the term 主席 (zhǔxí) to mean "president", but there are other Chinese words usually translated as "president", such as ...
Chinese characters are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent a language's morphemes, its most basic units of meaning. Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length.
"row" — objects which form lines (words 詞 / 词, etc.); occupations in a field (idiom, spoken language); 行 could also be pronounced as xíng, see below. 盒: hé hap6: hap6 objects in a small "box" or case (e.g. mooncakes, tapes) 戶 / 户: 户: hù wu6: wu6 households (户 is common in handwritten Traditional Chinese) — household ...
官話字母; Guānhuà zìmǔ, developed by Wang Zhao (1859–1933), was the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese developed by a Chinese person. This system was modeled on Japanese katakana, which he learned during a two-year stay in Japan, and consisted of letters that were based on components of Chinese characters. After returning to ...
Chinese phonology is generally described in terms of sound pairs of two initials (声母; 聲母; shēngmǔ) and finals (韵母; 韻母; yùnmǔ). This is distinct from the concept of consonant and vowel sounds as basic units in traditional (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Chinese language).