Have you studied any romance or Germanic languages like French or German? If so, you’ve probably found lots of similarities between those alphabets and the English alphabet. But the Chinese alphabet is another story because, basically…it doesn’t exist! But don’t panic: we’re here to help guide you through learning the Chinese alphabet. You can also find a guide to learning the Chinese characters on our blog.
Chinese Alphabet: What does Chinese look like? Does the Chinese alphabet exist?
Before we continue, it’s necessary to know the structure of Mandarin to understand how it works.
So let’s remember the four essential features of the language:
- Mandarin Chinese is written with Chinese characters
- Each character represents a symbol, NOT a letter
- A symbol illustrates the meaning of a word, not a unit of sound
- The symbols are represented by the same base according to their meaning, which allows them to be recognized
Is transcription possible?
It’s possible to transcribe the 28 letters of the English alphabet into Chinese characters to create a “translation” of the Chinese alphabet. However, this won’t help you communicate in daily situations.
The transcription could be helpful when you have to spell names and surnames, for example.
But remember, each Chinese character has its own meaning, so it would be impossible to associate every Chinese character with letters of the Latin alphabet. The message would lose all of its meaning. The same happens with numbers! Chinese numbers don’t usually have more than 2 or 3 characters. For these reasons, adapting something like “Jonathan” or “Stephanie” to the Chinese alphabet would be difficult.
Although the transcription of the English alphabet into Chinese has its limits, you’ll find an adaptation below:
[table “27” not found /]
Is pinyin a type of Chinese alphabet?
Now we know that directly transcribing English letters into Chinese isn’t the best way to get your message across; there’s another way!
Pinyin: a transcription adapted from the pronunciation of Chinese characters.
A type of Chinese alphabet?
Not quite…
However, this system of romanization of Chinese characters will be super helpful for you when you read in Mandarin, especially if you’re not very familiar with Chinese characters yet.
It’s also an excellent tool for learning to pronounce Chinese and for learning to write with the keyboard of your phone or computer.
Each pinyin key displays the equivalent character on the screen. Using pinyin makes it much easier to write messages than typing Chinese characters would be for beginners.
But wait! Even though Pinyin seems to be the perfect solution, writing Chinese with characters is still the only official way to write it.
So, learning the Chinese characters is not something you should put off until later!
- Consonants and vowels
Chinese is made up of consonants and vowels, just like English. The difference is that in Mandarin, each syllable is structured in the same way. Every syllable in Chinese begins with a consonant and ends with a vowel sound.
It’s for this reason that we call the consonants “initials” and the vowels “finals” [is this right?]
There are more than 20 initials and about 30 finals. More than 30 finals? How is that possible?
Does the Chinese alphabet have more vowels than the Latin alphabet?
No!
That’s why we said vowel sound. Sure, there are technically only so many vowels, but there are several different ways to pronounce these vowels depending on what language and dialect you speak.
Here’s a table with all the initials, finals, and groupings possible. You can listen to the pronunciation with just a click.
- Tones
And that’s not all! Chinese pronunciation is very particular and incorporates several different tones. In pinyin, these tones are marked by accent marks. There are four accent marks (so there are four tones). The tone changes the meaning of a word entirely. Here’s an example:
- 妈 (mā) means mother
- 麻 (má) means hemp
- 马 (mǎ) means horse
- 骂 (mà) means insult
So it’s important that you pay attention to the pronunciation of every tone…or you might make a mistake that leads to a serious misunderstanding! But what’s more likely is that you might say something that doesn’t make any sense.
So there you have it! Now that you know about the initials, the finals, and the four tones, you can read any word in pinyin.
How can you write Chinese without the Chinese alphabet?
If there’s not a Chinese alphabet, how can you write in Chinese? With the more than 40,000 characters that exist, it seems impossible!
But don’t worry…Although the number of Chinese characters is considerable, it’s not necessary to know them all in order to write or understand Mandarin. Just knowing 4,000 is sufficient. That sounds a lot more doable, right?
- The radicals
Chinese characters contain radicals. These radicals, or keys, represent a basic meaning.
They can be modified with certain components to create new words with a common meaning. Let’s compare it with an English example. Take the word “wash”: you can add a suffix or even a prefix to create a new word with a different meaning, like “washed”, “washer,” or even “re-wash”. Imagine “wash” as a Chinese radical and “-ed,” “-er,” and “re-” as components that change the meaning of the character when they are added.
So, in the word “China” (中国), we’ll find a character that means “country” (国), to which a specific radical is added to mean “China”. For the names of other countries, we’ll use the same radical for “country” with different traits to specify which specific country we’re talking about. France, for example, is written like this: 法国.
Easy, right? It’s like a puzzle; you just have to put the pieces together.
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