Traditional Chinese refers to the character set that was used in mainland China until the early 1950’s. It continues to be used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. It can also be seen in US Chinatowns that were founded before 1950.

Simplified Chinese refers to the character set that was created in 1952 by the Language Reform Research Committee of the People’s Republic of China to improve literacy rates. Even the Chinese government realized that Chinese characters are complex!

Most American high school and college students study Simplified Chinese.

The Chinese government hoped to reduce both the complexity of characters (numbers of strokes), as well as the total number of characters (originally, in excess of 50,000)!

The Table of General Standard Chinese Characters  is the “standard” list of 8,105 Simplified Chinese characters issued in 2013 by the People’s Republic of China. The characters are divided into three levels containing 3500, 3000 and 1605 characters, respectively. Characters in Group 1 and 2 (the first 6,500) are designated as common. That’s still a lot to learn!

There is generally a one-to-one correlation between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

Because Chinese is a character-based language, you cannot pronounce characters just by looking at them, although many characters have what is called a “phonetic component” that provides a hint as to the approximate pronunciation (more on this later).  Unlike alphabetic languages, where you can pronounce words even if you don’t know the meaning, semantics and phonetics are completely separate in Chinese!

Unlike English, there are 8 major (and numerous minor) spoken Chinese dialects, each of which is considered a distinct language.  Although all mainland Chinese people use the same written language (Simplified Chinese in mainland China), each major region has its own unique spoken language.

Each dialect has its own vocabulary, grammar and unique pronunciation of each character. The differences are so significant that Chinese who speak different dialects frequently cannot easily communicate with each other!

In the same way that Written Chinese was modernized in 1952, the PRC stipulated a standard dialect to be used by all PRC citizens. It is called the “Common Speech”.  In the West, we refer to it as Modern Mandarin.

Modern Mandarin is a composite of the 8 major dialects and has its own vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation standards.

It is mandated for all TV news, movies and other broadcasts.  But because 30% of the mainland population still does not speak Modern Mandarin,  subtitles in Simplified Chinese are included in all major broadcasts!

In the same way that it’s not possible to know the pronunciation of Chinese characters just by looking at them, it’s also not always possible to know the character that is referenced when someone speaks.  This is due to the large number of homophones (more on this later).

This is why we say that Chinese cannot be learned phonetically!  But conversely.  it’s also why pronunciation is so critical – students need to pronounce characters accurately to be able to recognize the characters that are referenced when someone is speaking.

Finally, unlike alphabet-based languages, Chinese needs a third phonetic system for standard pronunciation.  For Modern Mandarin, this phonetic system is called Pinyin, which literally means “spell the sound”.

Because each Chinese dialect has different pronunciation standards, they each have a separate phonetic guide.  So, when we use the term “Pinyin”, we are referring to the phonetic guide for Modern Mandarin.

Pinyin is a romanization of Chinese characters that uses most of the letters of the English alphabet.  Originally, it was used solely as a teaching tool for standard pronunciation.  Recently, it has also become the basis for entering Chinese characters into smart phones and computers.

But contrary to common perception among Westerners, it is not a language per se.

All Chinese students, native speakers and Westerners alike, must learn how to write each character, its meaning, as well as the Pinyin for that character.

Along with the creation of Modern Mandarin as the common dialect for all of mainland China, the government also commissioned the creation of a standard phonetic guide in 1952.

Interestingly, Pinyin was designed by a New York banker who had returned to China after the revolution ended in 1949.

The Pinyin for Modern Mandarin is a composite of the pronunciation of different dialects, but it is most similar to the pronunciation styles used in Beijing and Tianjin.  For this reason, Beijing is considered the best location to study “standard” Chinese.

There is a Pinyin for each of the 8,105 characters in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters.  A few characters have more than one pronunciation, so they have one Pinyin for each pronunciation.

Each Pinyin consists of a beginning sound (“initial”) and an ending sound (“final”) pronounced as a single syllable.  There are 412 unique Pinyin combinations.  All Pinyin are exactly one syllable and the pronunciation does not change regardless of the context in which a character is used.

For example, the Chinese word for “American” is 美国人 and the Pinyin for 美国人 is “mei guo ren”.  美 means “beautiful”. 国 means “country”. 人 means “person”.

To further differentiate sounds, 4 tones (plus a 5th neutral tone) were included in the standard for Modern Mandarin.

Tones can be flat, rising, falling / rising and falling and they are noted as a mark (diacritic) above each Pinyin.  Most digital dictionaries color-code tones.

In the example 美国人 above, adding tones to the Pinyin is rendered “měi guó rén”.

The combination of the phonetic spelling (initial and final) plus the tone (first, second, third and fourth) determines the precise pronunciation for each character.

Because Pinyin looks similar to English, some students try to use it as a language (instead of focusing on characters).  But Chinese do not view Pinyin as a language – if you send someone a text message in Pinyin, they will probably not understand what you are trying to say.

On the other hand, Pinyin is now widely used to enter characters in computers and phones.  We’ll cover this in depth later, but for now, just note that characters are entered in computers and phones phonetically using special software called Input Method Editors (IME’s).

This is one more reason to have accurate pronunciation – if you don’t, you won’t be able to use Pinyin to enter characters phonetically using IME’s.

Interestingly, Chinese who don’t have formal training in Pinyin frequently need to draw characters on their phones – IME’s support both phonetic entry and drawing.

If we look at Chinese as 3 distinct language systems, it becomes apparent that we need a different teaching model that is aligned with each of these 3 systems…

There are only 412 unique Pinyin sounds in Modern Mandarin.  Even with tones added to provide further differentiation, there are still many exact homophones in Chinese!

Because English is an inflective, not a tonal, language, most students do not have a natural talent for recognizing different tones.  To the Western ear, tone differences are very, very subtle.  But to the Chinese ear, incorrect (or no) tones are completely incomprehensible…!

In addition, Chinese also has many near-homophones (e.g. the “zh”, “ch”, “sh” and “z”, “c”, “s” initials and the “e” and “I” finals).  Despite the Pinyin spelling that may appear to be familiar to English speakers, pronouncing these near-homophones correctly is a bit more challenging than what you might expect.

The combination of identical Pinyin spelling, tones and near-homophones can be one of the biggest challenges faced by students.

So, when students comment that Chinese all sounds the same…it’s largely true!

Because of the prevalence of homophones, precise pronunciation is critical for:

• Listening Comprehension
• Learning Characters

For a variety of reasons, we tend to be “pronunciation tolerant” in the US and can understand foreigners who may not pronounce English with 100% accuracy.

But if your goal includes communicating with native Chinese speakers, especially in China, you’ll discover that Chinese requires precise pronunciation to communicate effectively.  Students who have successfully competed courses in the US, but have not mastered “standard” Mandarin pronunciation, may not be able to communicate in China.

It’s worth noting that the PRC has established precise standards for pronunciation, ranked on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 6 (highest).  In fact, native Chinese speakers will often comment that someone who has mastered pronunciation speak very “standard” Chinese!

Perhaps simply because of time constraints in large group classes, teachers may not pay a lot of attention to pronunciation and tones – it takes a lot of work to get it right!

Students need to develop a strong association between characters and their meanings – this is a major difference between Chinese and most Western languages, which, to a certain extent, can be learned phonetically.

For this reason, Western students tend to use phonetics as a primary “anchor” when learning other languages – we hear and associate phonetics and meanings.

But because of the overwhelming number of homophones and near-homophones, our focus as Chinese students needs to be the use of characters as the primary “anchor” for learning Chinese.  We associate characters with both meaning and  pronunciation.

At the same time, at Breakthru Chinese ® we also focus on standard pronunciation to enable students to recognize the most subtle differences in Modern Mandarin.

While we are not speech specialists, we do provide coaching in the precise use of breath, tongue, teeth and lips to accurately render standard Mandarin pronunciation.