Sinograph Addenda

Pinyin — how to read the voice

Every character in this school carries its modern Mandarin reading in pinyin — the official romanization of Chinese, adopted in 1958 and used today everywhere from Beijing classrooms to your phone’s keyboard.¹ Pinyin uses familiar letters, but about a third of them do not say what an English reader expects. This page is the key: read it once, come back when a syllable surprises you.

The tones

A Mandarin syllable has a tone — a fixed pitch shape that is as much a part of the word as its consonants. Same syllable, different tone, different word: mā is “mother,” mǎ is “horse.” The tone mark sits over the vowel, and its shape draws the pitch:

(The neutral row’s clip is 嗎, the question particlea small function word that frames or flavors a sentence without naming any thing or action — listen for how it is thrown away: short, low, unstressed.) All four tones in one breath, one voice:

Mother scolds the horse about the hemp: the ma set is the tradition’s own first lesson, and it is worth saying aloud until the four shapes feel different in your mouth.

The initials

Consonants, in the groups that matter. The left column is pinyin; the “hold” column is the closest English anchor — exact values, where English has none, are in the bracketed IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet).²

The two traps: the j q x row (no English match — aim for “jee/chee/shee” with the tongue-tip resting down) and the fact that c is always ts: 曹操 Cáo Cāo begins like “tsow,” never like “cow.” Hear the trap rows. Every row below holds the tone constant, so the only thing that changes from clip to clip is the consonant — and in the first two rows the columns line up as minimal pairs: read down a column (bù/pù, dù/tù, gù/kù) to hear the puff appear, nothing else:

Notice how the buzz of zhī, chī, and shī just carries on where an English vowel would start — that is the “i” of the third face. In zū · cū · sū the same three-way step meets a plain “oo” vowel instead, so the ds/ts/s difference stands alone.

The finals

Vowels and endings. Most are steady; three need care.

Hear the two sounds English is missing — the whistle-vowel and the back-of-the-mouth e:

Tones on the move

Two adjustments happen in real speech, and you will hear them the moment you listen to any recording:

• Two third tones in a row: the first becomes a second tone. “Hello,” written nǐ hǎo, is said ní hǎo.
• 不not · bù · not — the plain negation “not” and 一one · yī · one; whole, unified “one” shift tone by what follows them — 不not · bù · not — the plain negation is bù alone but bú before a fourth tone; 一one · yī · one; whole, unified is yī in counting, yí or yì in the flow of speech.

Texts in this school always print the base tone — the dictionary’s form — and let your ear make the adjustments, which is the standard practice.

A modern voice for old texts

One honest reminder from the course orientation: pinyin gives you the modern Mandarin readings — the voice the field itself uses to read the classics aloud. The classics were not pronounced this way; the old sounds are a reconstruction problem, and this school tells that story in its own later chapter rather than pretending the problem away.

The audio is synthesized: one standard modern-Mandarin voice for every syllable and every voiced line in the school, and every clip is machine-checked before it ships — it must sing the tone it prints, at matched loudness, or it is refused and remade. Engine, voice, and per-file records in the credits file, served from this site, never hotlinked.