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Many non-native Chinese speakers have difficulties mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). Statistically, tones are as important as vowels in Standard Chinese.
Korean, Vietnamese, some Chinese dialects and minority languages (such as Zhuang and Yao) that use Chinese characters also have similar pronunciation methods for Chinese characters. In Korea, kun'yomi is called "interpretation reading" (釋讀). These phenomena also appear in Mandarin and English, such as "i.e." is read as "that is".
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 ...
However, ABC English–Chinese, Chinese–English Dictionary (2010) [3] uses the following notation to indicate both the original tone and the tone after the sandhi: 一 (yī) pronounced in second tone (yí) is written as yị̄. [a] e.g. 一共 (underlying yīgòng, realized as yígòng) is written as yị̄gòng
Books containing both Chinese characters and pinyin are often used by foreign learners of Chinese. Pinyin's role in teaching pronunciation to foreigners and children is similar in some respects to furigana-based books with hiragana letters written alongside kanji (directly analogous to bopomofo) in Japanese, or fully vocalised texts in Arabic.
The pronunciation of Standard Chinese is defined as that of the Beijing dialect. [71] The usual unit of analysis is the syllable, consisting of an optional initial consonant, an optional medial glide, a main vowel and an optional coda, and further distinguished by a tone. [72]
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Wu Chinese on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Wu Chinese in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Youbian dubian (simplified Chinese: 有边读边; traditional Chinese: 有邊讀邊; pinyin: yǒu biān dú biān; lit. 'read the side if any'), or dubanbian (读半边; 讀半邊; dú bàn biān; 'read the half'), is a rule of thumb people use to pronounce a Chinese character when they do not know its exact pronunciation.