Chinese Alphabet for Beginners_ Lesson 1_ Why Learn Pinyin Not Bopomofo__Systematic Pinyin Course.

Hello everyone, welcome to my channel. I'm Yona. Today is the pre-class guidance for our systematic pinyin course. Let's learn some basic knowledge about Chinese alphabet. Pinyin. If you are just starting to learn Chinese, I bet you had this confusion. There are two different Chinese alphabet systems. Which one should I learn? And there are two different forms of Chinese characters. Which one should I write? Why? Well, let's look at our story. The Chinese don't have a simple phonetic system. The ancients mainly used the cumbersome reverse tangent method to mark the pronunciation of Chinese characters. It's hard to learn. By the early 20th century, in 1918, the Beijing government officially announced the phonetic This is also a phonetic way of Chinese characters. Today our country Taiwan is still using this phonetic symbols. However, this phonetic method, it's hard to learn. Moreover, it is not the mainstream learning method for introductory Hanyu pinyin. It is not recommended that foreign learners learn it. After the founding of new China, in order to popularize education, let people read and write. In order to make Chinese more accessible to the world, in 1958, our country's linguists learned from the internationally accepted Latin alphabet and phonetics principles, designed the Chinese pinyin we use now. That's why our pinyin is very similar to the shape of the English alphabet. The reason why the writing is nearly identical and the spelling rules have China also made a simplified reform of Chinese characters, abandoned the traditional Chinese characters of the past. At present, our country accept Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. In all regions, traditional Chinese characters are no longer used in daily life. Simplified characters are more convenient to use. It is the current mainstream word. What we need to learn is simplified characters. And after learning simplified characters, you can almost understand traditional characters. So we should learn Chinese pinyin and simplify Chinese. The function of Chinese pinyin. Pinyin helps us pronounce each character. For example, Pinyin shows us exactly how to pronounce each character. Sometimes if you know how to say a However, note that some Chinese words share the same pinyin but have different meanings. For instance, can mean both strings and numbers. So pinyin is a pronunciation tool. It is not a real language. That's exactly why we still need to learn Chinese characters after mastering pinyin. Next, let's learn the basic structure of pinyin. Let me know first. What follows may be a little challenging for beginners. If you find this hard to understand, don't worry. After finishing my upcoming pinyin lessons, you can come back to this part later. It will help you build a systematic logical framework. Now let's learn about the structure and types of pinyin. One Chinese character generally corresponds to one pinyin syllable. A common pinyin syllable mainly consists of three parts, initial, final, and tone. For example, All syllables must contain a final and a tone. A small number of syllables have no initial consonants. We call them zero-initial syllables. For example, There are 23 initials in total in pinyin. Note that phonetically, yi and wu are used for syllable separation, no real initials. But usually we grow that into initials to make learning easier. There are 24 finals in pinyin. They are divided into 6 single finals, 8 compound finals, 1 special final, and 9 nasal finals. In addition, we also need to learn the whole recognition syllables in pinyin. There are 16 in total. Home recognition syllables are special pinyin songs. You read them as a whole, no spelling needed. Just memorize them directly. There are 4 tones in Chinese pinyin. The 1st tone, the 2nd tone, the 3rd tone, and the 4th tone. Besides, we also have the neutral tone. It is pronounced softly and briefly, with no fixed tone. But we won't focus on this in our pinyin lessons. We will cover it in speaking practice lessons. To sum up, there are all the key parts of pinyin we need to learn. Finally, to help everyone systematically master all Chinese pinyin knowledge step by step, rather than learn scattered bits here and there, I have decided a 12-lesson systematic study plan. Follow me, let's study together. I'm Yona. See you in my next video. Bye-bye.