elementary Chinese part 1

elementary Chinese part 2

intermediary Chinese part 3

intermediary Chinese part 4

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mandarin tone drill

duo-tone drill

tone activities

• choose the tone
• enter the tone
• choose tone combo
• enter tone combo

initial activities

• choose the initial
• enter the initial

final activities

• choose the final
• enter the final

self quiz

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“This series of lessons teaches how to read and pronounce “Pinyin” which is the official system for representing Mandarin with the Roman alphabet. Listen to the pronunciation by scrolling over or clicking on the Pinyin. Practice these sounds until you sound like the native speaker.

Overview

Pinyin is a way to represent Chinese characters and express the sounds in the Chinese language using the alphabet. There are other systems to express Mandarin, but Pinyin is the most accepted and widely used. Once you learn Pinyin you will know how to pronounce any word in Mandarin using a Chinese dictionary. Pinyin is also the most common way to input Chinese characters into a computer. Although Pinyin and English both use the Roman alphabet, many letters are not expressed with the same sounds that English uses.

Initals and Finals

Words expressed in pinyin use a set of 21 sounds representing the beginning of the word called initials, and a set of 37 sounds representing the end of the word called finals. These combine to form about 420 different sounds.

Tones

Words in Mandarin that have the same pronunciation can have different meanings depending on how the word is said. The “tone” of a word describes how the the pitch of the speaker’s voice changes as the word is said. There are four “tones” in Mandarin which we will cover in detail in the “Tones” section. The tones are represented in pinyin by marks above the words.There are a number of spelling rules and exceptions to rules that you will learn in these lessons.”

• Initials
• Finals
• Spelling Rules
• Combination Tables
• Tones
• Change of Tone

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“This companion website, funded by Instructional Improvement Program at UCSD in 2006-7, is designed to help students in first-year Chinese classes (or whoever is in need) to review and practice Chinese pronunciation at their own pace and comfort level. This site contains a complete Chinese pronunciation guide with all existing syllables in Mandarin Chinese. Each syllable is clickable and provides male/female sound counterparts. Each section also comes with matching interactive exercise for self-evaluation. Just click on Exercise page and choose from the menu on the left.”

• Structure of a Syllable
• Four Tones
• Simple Initials/Finals
• More Initials
• Compound Finals
• Tones in Combination
• Spelling Rules

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download here

“These drills are intended for beginner to intermediate students of Mandarin Chinese. While the words for the drills were chosen with specific tones in mind, all words are appropriate for first year students of Chinese. None of them are “nonsense words” chosen merely for the sake of practice; they are all well worth learning. Although the primary grouping of words is tonal, words are also listed in order of difficulty, with difficulty level increasing from left to right.

Note to the Learner

These drills are designed to help students with some foundation in the tones of Mandarin Chinese. They are not designed to help absolute beginners “learn tones” on their own. Basic understanding of Chinese phonetics and tones is assumed.

• PDF files with both simplified and traditional character versions
• English translations of all the words used in the drills
• MP3 files with playlists for easy playback”