Can I learn Chinese with only pinyin?

For zero beginners, pinyin makes Mandarin accessible and approachable. Students can get a hang of it quickly, and be able to speak some basic Mandarin without any knowledge of Chinese characters. Secondly, students cannot ground meanings into pinyin, as they can do so with characters.

Can mandarin be understood without tones?

Originally Answered: If I speak Mandarin Chinese without tones, will I be understood? mostly it is ok, because oral Chinese is not only based on tones, but the combination of pinyin. For example, pinyin is 拼音. Just pin or yin with any tone is no sense.

What is Sandhi in Mandarin?

They’re also sometimes called tone sandhi, which is a general term used by linguists to describe tone changes that occur in response to the way adjacent words or syllables are pronounced. Tone changes in Mandarin Chinese are contextual.

How can you tell the difference between pinyin tones?

There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese, which are:

1. First tone: a level and higher pitch.
2. Second tone: rising, start from a lower pitch and end at a slightly higher pitch.
3. Third tone: falling rising, start at a neutral tone then dip to a lower pitch before ending at a higher pitch.

Is it possible to learn Mandarin Chinese without learning pinyin?

Pinyin was invented in the 1950s to help unify the 50+ dialects of spoken Chinese and provide a guide for people to learn the pronunciation of Chinese. So it is possible to learn mandarin Chinese without learning pinyin, but as a non-native, you would be making things rather difficult for yourself!

What is pinyin and how to use it?

What is Pinyin? Pinyin is the phonetic system of Chinese language. It is the most widely-used system of writing Mandarin Chinese that uses the Latin alphabet. Most importantly, it’s a great tool to help you learn the accurate pronunciation of Mandarin words and input Chinese characters on your computer or smartphone.

How hard is it to read in Mandarin?

When you start learning Chinese, it might be something you look forward to or something you dread, but there’s no way around it – if you want to learn the language, you’ll have to learn how to read in Mandarin. Fortunately, reading Chinese is not as hard as you might imagine, although you’ll certainly have to put in the hours.

Can Mandarin speakers understand Cantonese?

They should be able to understand basic words, but Cantonese has a lot more slangs than Mandarin and people who speaks Mandarin most likely won’t be able to understand the Cantonese slangs. Personally yes. I grew up in Hong Kong, parent spoke Cantonese and English at home. Went to an international school which teach Chinese using mandarin.