The answer is simple! You have to learn Pinyin first. Pinyin is the name of the spelling system to spell out the sounds of Chinese words in Roman letters. It’s the written aid to pronunciation.
Pinyin was adopted by mainland China in 1958 and is the official romanisation system used today, others systems such as “wade giles” do exist, though they are used less and less, or not used at all for Mandarin Chinese beginner learners.
Without knowing Pinyin, it’s very difficult for people to learn Chinese as a foreign language. The every first step of learning to speak Mandarin Chinese, is via learning Pinyin.
The most encouraging news for all new beginners is Mandarin Chinese only has 409 syllables, and four tones. The simple fact is if you learn well the 409 syllables, you can speak any Chinese words.
In our Beginner course, we takes the initial 6 weeks in each lesson to help students with 30mins intensive Pinyin training. We recommend the best way to learn the sound of a new language is always by copying the pronunciations from a professional native speakers. With a small group class, our teachers pay attention to each student, and guarantee your best pronunciation by the end of training.
However, we do encourage students to stay positive of your pronunciation even if you sound foreign or not very much on the right tone sometimes when speaking Mandarin Chinese. It’s really OK. You can see people from different areas speak with different accents, say a local Londoner vs a local Liverpool person? Or say Mark Zuckerberg here, in his public speech, pronunciation not perfect, but the crowd understood him very well, and loved it.
You now should know Practical Mandarin love technology, we recommend our students to use a few cool apps for Pinyin and accent study. Pin Pin is a great app with quiz tests. Radio Chinese Plus is a good app for just listening to Mandarin Chinese radio programs on your phone.
