Chinese Pronunciation Guide

This is going to be a boring post.

As requested by a good friend, I am going to start adding phonetic enunciation. Though pinyin (the romanization of Chinese characters) can usually be sounded out using phonics, there are notable exceptions that don't follow the logical (or illogical) patterns of English. The complication in using the roman alphabet to symbolize Chinese words is largely based on the lack of any sort of alphabet in China. Without going too much in depth, the character 馬 means horse. The lines and shape of the character have nothing to do with how the word is spoken. Absolutely nothing. Despite this, you would read this character as "ma." The problem in translation and transliteration between languages is that the alphabet limits the speaker to the the sounds defined by that language. So when using the phonetic sounds of English to say Chinese words, many of the sounds required for the language fall outside of the limits of our native tongue.

So to compensate for this discrepancy, letters and combinations of letters take on different sounds. For example:

zh = j (as in Joseph), Zhonggua (Middle Kingdom) is spoken as "Jong-gua"
c = ts (as in whats), Zhongqua Cai (Chinese food) is spoken as "Jong-gua tsai"
z = ds (as in words), Zaoshang (morning) is spoken as "dsao-shang"
q = ch (as in change), Qingdao (Green Island) is "Ching-dao"
x = sh (as in wish), xiexie (thank you) is spoken as shyeah shyeah.

There are many more little quirks that I am not going to teach you. Instead, I will try to remember to give phonetic enunciation of Chinese words in the future. The best online dictionary for translating Chinese can be found at Yellow Bridge. Also, for those of you who have no interest in learning any Chinese, don't worry about tones. They will confuse and frustrate, though I might post something about them later. Probably when I'm struggling with them on a daily basis.

In summary, in three weeks time I will be moving to Qingdao (Ching-dao). Questions?