Peking Duck (北京烤鸭)

Pronunciation

The primary purpose of pinyin in Chinese schools is to teach Mandarin pronunciation. Many in the West are under the mistaken belief that pinyin is used to help children associate characters with spoken words which they already know, but this is incorrect as many Chinese do not use Mandarin at home, and therefore do not know the Mandarin pronunciation of words until they learn them in elementary school through the use of pinyin. Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet, hence the pronunciation is relatively straightforward for Westerners. A pitfall for novices is, however, the unusual pronunciation of "x", "q" and (for English speakers) "c" and "z". The sounds represented by "x" and "q" in Western languages don't exist in Chinese, so the Pinyin system "recycles" them and assigns them other sounds: "x" represents a soft "sh" (like the "sh" in "sharp" but not as fully sounding), "q" represents a soft "ch" (again, like the "ch" in "chin" but not quite). The "c" is pronounced like "ts", "z" like "ds". Finally, "ü" stands for the same sound as in German and "u" is pronounced like "ü" if it follows "y", "x", "j" or "q". The combined initials, vowels, and finals represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language.

More detailed pronuciation rules:

Source: Pinyin - Wikipedia

Tones（声調）:

Initially, the four tones (四声） of Mandarin might sound quite similar to you. However, by the end of just one hour of class you should be able to hear the differences among the four tones. By the end of another one or two days you ought to be able to distinguish the differences in your own pronunciation, but only for single syllables spoken in isolation. The real challenge will come when syllables are strung together to form words, phrases and sentences. Getting the tone right for each syllable in a longer string of syllables is something you will have to pay particular attention to for a significantly longer period of time.

A considerable amount of misunderstanding exists about Mandarin tones. In particular, many first-time learners are told how easy it is to utter something unintended by failing to utilize the correct tone, for instance blurting out "I came here on a fat chicken" when what you intended to say was "I came here by airplane". In actuality, you must first get to the point where you can produce natural and authentic Mandarin tonal contours on a consistent basis before you are capable of making that kind of error. In the beginning, before your tonal contours are clear and consistent, you are much more likely to sound very garbled, creating things with the equivalent clarity of "Ah keem har by futpleen". In other words, in the beginning, your problem will likely be the frequent use of pseudo-tones that are not very recognizable as tones to native speakers. Furthermore, you would not even be able to repeat them on a consistent basis. Under your primitive control of tones, the listener is forced to filter out the distracting noise and make an educated guess as to what you were really trying to say. To get to the point as quickly as possible where real Mandarin tones are coming out of your mouth on command, a word or two about how tone in Chinese is produced and how it is best represented are in order.

Tone in Chinese is formed by controlling the pitch of your voice to form a distinctive pitch contour. By maintaining or changing your pitch over the entire duration of the syllable you are able to control the pitch contour for that syllable. To make your tones sound as natural as possible, you should keep the following two points in mind:

Each tone has a fixed, underlying contour such as level, rising or falling. There are no fixed frequencies for these contours, however. Just how high or how low the frequency of a particular tone should be will vary on the basis of individual voice type, rate of speech and emotional state at the time the syllable is spoken. A good tone is best characterized in terms of its starting point and end point within any particular speaker's normal voice range. For several decades Chinese linguists have been using a convention devised by Y. R. Chao to indicate fixed, underlying tonal contours. Based on a relative scale of 1 through 5, with 1 indicating the low point of a person's normal pitch range and 5 indicating the high point, it is possible to describe any level, rising or falling contour in terms of its starting point and its endpoint. A high, level tone is thus represented as 55, while a full falling tone is represented as 51. For tones that dip or peak, a mid-point is added in addition to a starting point and an endpoint. A tone that starts low, goes down even further and then rises to a point somewhere around the mid-level of a person's normal pitch range would be written as 213. Using this system we can now look at the four underlying contours of Mandarin. Tone 1 high level 55 ma 'mother' （妈）

Tone 2 mid rising 35 ma 'hemp' （麻）

Tone 3 low falling 21* ma 'horse' （马）

Tone 4 high falling 51 ma 'to scold/curse' （骂）

*Traditionally, the Mandarin tone 3 contour is portrayed as being 213. However, this contour is only used for individual tone 3 syllables spoken in isolation or spoken directly before a pause. The rest of the time, when the tone 3 syllable is directly followed by another syllable (i.e. in the vast majority of cases that a tone 3 syllable is spoken), a 21 contour is normally used. This tone 3 contour is nothing more than a low, gravely voice. Additionally, in Taiwan, many native speakers no longer use the 213 contour, even when the tone 3 syllable is spoken in isolation. Finally, it has been observed that when tone 3 is taught as having an underlying 213 contour, many students experience long-term difficulty discriminating that contour from the tone 2 contour (35). However, it has been reported that this problem is largely avoided when tone 3 is instead taught as having an underlying 21 contour. For all of these reasons tone 3 is taught here as having a 21 contour.

Source: Pronunciation & Romanization

Test charts for tonal pinyin in Unicode Web pages.

一声(**)		二声		三声(***)
Character	Code	Character	Code	Character	Code
ā	ā	á	á	ǎ	ǎ
ē	ē	é	é	ě	ě
ī	ī	í	í	ǐ	ǐ
ō	ō	ó	ó	ǒ	ǒ
ū	ū	ú	ú	ǔ	ǔ
ǖ	ǖ	ǘ	ǘ	ǚ	ǚ

(**) (一声= with a macron ￣ placed over a vowel)
Post | Preview 画面では正常に表現されるもののスクリンで文字化けする（Windows 98）。Windows XP では正しくスクリンに反映される。
(***) (三声= with a hacek or a caron placed over a vowel)
ě 以外の Character は文字化けする。

四声
Character	Code
à	à
è	è
ì	ì
ò	ò
ù	ù
ǜ	ǜ

Source: Test page for displaying pinyin tone marks with Unicode.

Writing Pinyin（拼音）

When writing in pinyin, the 2nd and 4th tones are easy. They are just the acute and grave accents and are part of any standard font. But the 1st and 3rd tones and tone marks over the u with umlaut are harder. The 1st tone is called the macron and the 3rd tone the caron.

I (*Helmer Aslaksen) will demonstrate two methods for inputting pinyin.

My (*his) first method is to use Unicode character codes, either numeric character reference or named character entities. This is not as hard as it seems. If you write a lot of pinyin and use a smart editor, you can define keyboard macros, or write things like “zha1ng” and then do a replace at the end. If your editor is smart, you can even define a script that does this for all the combinations.

Or you can simply use the wonderful Pinyin to Unicode Converter at Konrad Mitchell Lawson's The Fool's Workshop. You just input “zhong1guo2 shi4 shi4jie4 zui4 hao3 de guo2jia1” and out comes “zhōngguó shì shìjiè zuì hǎo de guójiā” in both Unicode and character codes.

Latin-1 Supplement - Unicode U+0080 - U+00FF - (128-255)

Character	Code	Code	Code
á	á	á	á
à	à	à	à
é	é	é	é
è	è	è	è
í	í	í	í
ì	ì	ì	ì
ó	ó	ó	ó
ò	ò	ò	ò
ú	ú	ú	ú
ù	ù	ù	ù
ü	ü	ü	ü

subtract 32 for upper case

Latin Extended-A - Unicode U+0100 - U+017F - (256-383)

Character(*)	Code	Code
ā	ā	ā
ē	ē	ē
ě	ě	ě
ī	ī	ī
ō	ō	ō
ū	ū	ū

(*) Post | Preview 画面では正常に表現されるものの、 1) Windows 98SE で ě 以外の Character (with a macron ￣ placed over a vowel) はスクリン上で文字化けする。2) Windows XP では全部が正常に表示される。
・subtract 1 for upper case

Source: Reading and Writing Chinese Characters and Pinyin on the Web Using Unicode by Helmer Aslaksen

这是正宗的北京烤鸭。 zhè shì zhèng zong(1) de Běijing(1) kao(3) ya(1)。
怎么个吃法? Zěn me gè chi(1) fa(3)?