Pinyin Rules: Initials, Finals, and Tones

Note 1: Some Northeners, especially around Beijing, add an er sound to certain words (for example: na becomes nar and bian becomes bianr). However, unless you know that that particular word is used in that manner, do not indiscriminately add an ending er to try to sound more Northern.

Popup Notes. View summary of pinyin pronunciation rules along this table.

Chinese is a tonal language, i.e., a tones change the meanings of words. Since Mandarin has a limited number of syllables, there are a lot of homophones whose meaning varies with the tone. In the table shown to the right, the syllable is ma but the tone is different. In fact, we can assemble the following sentence:

妈妈骂马吗 - māma mà mǎ ma?
Properly pronounced, the sentence translates into "Does Mamma scold the horse?"

Mandarin is normally said to have just four tones. However, there is also a neutral tone which does not occur very often but is just as important. The tone is indicated by a tone mark placed on top the vowel. It should be placed on the letter a or e is present, on the letter o in the ou final, and on the last vowel in all other cases. The neutral tone is indicated by the lack of tone mark.

See also

• Pinyin Combination Table. The actual number of syllables in use is only about half the number of possible combinations of initials and finals.
• Greetings. Jump right into your first few Chinese phrases.
• Zhuyin and Pinyin Conversion Table. If you learned Zhuyin, popularly known as Bopomofo, you can quickly learn the Pinyin system using this simple conversion table.
• Mandarin Phonetic Systems Conversion Table. Shows the corresponding representation among the four most popular phonetic schemes used in recent history: Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Yale, and Zhuyin.