Standard Chinese often is called Putonghua or mandarin.


There are five features in Standard Chinese:


First,Standard Chinese use pinyin to write down the sounds with the abc. pinyin is chinese phonetic
symbol.


There are 39 finals and 21 initials in the phonetic symbols in Modern Chinese.

39 finals are composed of vowel or vowel followed by nasal consonants.

These finals fall into three categories:

　　(1)simple finals which have only a single vowel, eg. a,o e i u ü;

　　(2)multi-finals which have two or three vowels, eg. ai,ua,iao;

　　(3)nasal finals which consist of one or two vowels and a nasal consonant's eg. an,üan,eng,iong.


21 initials are consonants beginning a syllable.

we will learn chinese phonetic symbols in after days .


Second , Standard Chinese is a tonal language. it has four tones - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.

For example, the sound ma have four tones: mā má mǎ mà.

different tone, different meaning.

For example, 妈, first tone, mā means "mother",a child often calls his mother "妈妈" or "妈" ,
while 马, third tone, mǎ means horse.

Actually another way to help you remember which tone is which is by saying this: 1 2 3 4.


To show what tone a word is,

we put a small horizontal dash over the vowel part to show it's 1st tone,flat.eg.ā

a small line going up 45 degrees from left to right for the second, up or raising eg.á

one going down and then up for the 3rd, down and up ,eg.ǎ

and one going down from left to right for the fourth,down eg.à


by the way , Some sounds don't always have a tone. They are pronounced lightly, with no particular
stress, like 了 or 吗. that is not important .




Third , all word in Chinese is simple syllable. that is say ,you must pronounce every word in a
syllable .

It is very different from English ,In a English word maybe have two or three ,four syllable ,isn 't
it ? but in Chinese , a word ,a syllable .



Forth ,in English ,sometime tow words need to pronounce together. eg."would you" should pronouce
together. but in Chinese ,very time we must pronounce all words separative(independently).It is very
different between Chinese and English too . In Chinese no pronounce-together,no write-together.

so ,Chinese is easer to hear and to say than English .but writing Chinese word is more difficult than
English .



Fifth ,a
Chinese word ,or a
Chinese character ,is compose by one or many strokes .the basic strokes
have seven :

horizontal stroke 横

vertical stroke 竖

left-falling stroke 撇

right-falling stroke 捺

turning stroke 折

hook stroke 钓

dot stroke 点

The sequence-write of
Chinese words is from top to bottom ,from left to right ,from out to in.

we will learn how to write Chinese words that we study in after days.