Pronunciation

Mandarin can be written phonetically in the Latin alphabet using pinyin. We use pinyin to transliterate Chinese names or words into English. We also use it to type Chinese on the computer or on a phone.

Warning. Pinyin is not designed for English speakers. If you try to pronounce Chinese words by reading the pinyin phonetically, you will butcher the language.

To acquire proper pronunciation is a matter of listening. This means that you should be immersing in content with spoken Mandarin, such as movies or videos. If you use a flash card program, such as Anki, you should be using decks where each card has the text read aloud to you. There are also text-to-speech (TTS) tools, such as Google Translate, which can be a good reference when no native audio is available.

Always defer to native audio. But nevertheless, it will be useful to spend some time studying the basics of pinyin. The Pinyin Tips section later gives some hints.