This website was created for the course Chinese 342 “The Chinese Language”, an introduction to Chinese linguistics taught at the University of Washington. It is intended as a companion to the Chinese 342 course packet section on phonetics and phonology. It is also made available to the general public.
The Consonants and Vowels pages contain a subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet charts of phonetic symbols, including those sounds that are found in Modern Standard Mandarin. (Complete IPA charts can be found at the website of the International Phonetic Association.) You can click on the symbols to hear the sounds pronounced.
The Finals page lists all the finals of Modern Standard Mandarin syllables.
The Mandarin Syllables page is a complete chart of Modern Standard Mandarin syllables, based on the chart “Table of the Speech Sounds of Peking Dialect” found in Ramsey 1987:48.1 The operation of pinyin spelling rules can be observed by comparing the base pinyin forms of the finals in the header row with the spelled forms in the cells. You can click on the cells to hear the syllables pronounced.
On all four pages, clicking the “Pinyin/IPA” button will toggle between the representation of sounds in pinyin and in phonetic notation. Note that the phonetic representation used in Chinese 342 and on this website is a broad transcription. A number of simplifications have been made, including making no distinction between [a] and [ɑ] (only <a> is used) and no distinction between [ə] and [ʌ] (only <ə> is used). It should also be noted that the phonetic notation follows several conventions of the field of Chinese dialectology, including (1) using the non-IPA symbols [ɿ] and [ʅ] for the super-high apico-alveolar and apico-retroflex vowels, and (2) using [i], [u], and [y] to represent glides instead of [j], [w] and [ɥ]. For a narrow phonetic transcription of Modern Standard Mandarin initials and finals, see Norman 1988:139-141.2
Credits
Prof. Zev Handel, University of Washington
Kevin Tahmoresi, University of Washington
Dr. Chén Mò 陈茉, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics (西南财经大学)
1 S. Robert Ramsey, 1987, The Languages of China, Princeton University Press.
2 Jerry Norman, 1988, Chinese, Cambridge University Press.