The Pinyin Initials â¢There are 21 initials in the pinyin spelling system â¢These will be indicated in the following tables, giving the initials in pinyin and IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and, where useful, the equivalent pronunciation in English â¢(IPA from Wang, Zhu, and Ren (1983)-see Note 1) Unlike many languages, Chinese doesnât have an alphabet and itâs not written as a series of letters, but rather as a series of pictures that have meaning and sounds. The Chinese language is one of the oldest in the world. Other phonetic transcription systems do exist but are less and less used. Chinese phonetics : The pinyin - Lesson 01. Written Chinese (Chinese: ä¸æ; pinyin: zhÅngwén) comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language.Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary.Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. Pinyin also has its own alphabet song.. Hanyu Pinyin alphabet for Mandarin Chinese, with IPA. Chinese teachers and educators almost unanimously agree that Chinese must be learned with Chinese characters, but most are also using the Pinyin Chinese alphabet system to help facilitate learning. The writing of Pinyin is similar to English alphabet. It even includes diacritics to indicate tones, so if you donât necessarily need to learn written Chinese and its many characters, Pinyin is a great way to get going. Pinyin æ¼é³ is the system used for transcribing the sounds of Chinese words into the Latin alphabet. The Cyrillization of Chinese (Hanyu Cyril Pinyin) is the transcription of Chinese characters into the Cyrillic alphabet.. Hanyu Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Mandarin Chinese sounds into a Latin alphabet. If you listen carefully you will find Chinese is a very beautiful language as it has more musical sounds (vowels) than noise (consonants). Pinyin is a way to transcribe Chinese characters so people can pronounce it. Chinese Final Vowels The system we are using now is called âHanyu Pinyinâ, or just Pinyin, which consists of Roman letters, therefore, these letters are what people referred to as the Chinese alphabet. In this way you can easily master the rules of the alphabet system in Chinese. Pinyin was created in the 1950s in mainland China and is widely adopted internationally since 1982. Learning Chinese alphabet is the most important step towards Chinese Pinyin and Chinese characters learning.. We categorize all the Chinese letters into initial consonants and final vowels, which are the two parts of Chinese pinyin.In this way you can easily master the rules of the alphabet system in Chinese. If you have trouble viewing the IPA here, see the alternate version. It's a written aid to pronunciation created in China in 1958. The most important step towards Chinese Pinyin and Chinese characters learning is to learn Chinese alphabet.We categorize all the Chinese letters into initial consonants and final vowels, which are the two parts of Chinese pinyin. It was invented in 1950s, and adopted as a standard in mainland China in 1958. In other words, Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet to tell you exactly how to pronounce Chinese characters.