Chinese is a language where the pronunciations must be memorized. They cannot be derived from written Chinese words, because they use a logographic writing system, with complex and seemingly arbitrary symbols representing the word.
As such, we have to write the pronunciation of each Chinese word. Luckily, Pinyin fairly accurately represents the pronunciation of Chinese logograms, and most all Chinese words have their Pinyin form. From this Pinyin representation, we can automatically generate the pronunciation of the word in Tone Text. While there might be rare edge cases where the pattern doesn't fit, most of the time it will be accurate (and wherever there is an edge case, Pinyin also breaks down too).
Here are the 18 fundamental consonants used when speaking Chinese.
For a complete list of possible consonants a human voice might make while speaking a natural language, check out the consonants page.
This language has aspirated consonants and palatalized consonants.
| bilabial | labiodental | dental | alveolar | postalveolar | retroflex | velar | uvular | pharyngeal | glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| voiced nasal | |||||||||||
| quiet plosive | |||||||||||
| quiet aspirated plosive | |||||||||||
| quiet sibilant fricative | |||||||||||
| quiet palatalized sibilant fricative | |||||||||||
| voiced sibilant fricative | |||||||||||
| quiet non-sibilant fricative | |||||||||||
| voiced approximant | |||||||||||
| voiced lateral approximant |
These are the 10 base vowels used when speaking Chinese.
Also, a complete list of possible vowels a human voice might make while speaking can be found here.
| manner | front unrounded | front rounded | front central unrounded | front central rounded | central unrounded | central rounded | back central unrounded | back central rounded | back unrounded | back rounded | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| close | |||||||||||
| near-close | |||||||||||
| close-mid | |||||||||||
| mid | |||||||||||
| open-mid | |||||||||||
| open |