About Us

What is Chinese Phonetics Express about?

Before learning to speak Chinese, you have to learn the prior knowledge concerning Chinese phonetics so that you can pronounce each phoneme correctly. Chinese Phonetics Express (CPE) is to help you acquire the prior knowledge and to help you make correct pronunciations of all the phonemes.

Here are some terminologies that you will encounter when learning Chinese phonetics in this website:

• • Hanyu Pinyin: the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hanyu means the Chinese language, and pinyin means "spell sound", or the spelling of the sound.

  • Zhuyin Fuhao: often abbreviated zhuyin, annotated sounds, a phonetic transliteration for Chinese used esp. in Taiwan, also known as Bopomofoㄅㄆㄇㄈ.

  • Initial sound: fundamental elements in pinyin, similar to consonants in English. There are 21 initials. More…

  • Final sound: fundamental elements in pinyin, similar to vowels in English, but much more complicated due to the compound finals. There are 35 finals. More…

  • Tones: The pinyin system uses diacritics for the four pitched tones, and a “toneless” tone, of Mandarin, usually above a non-medial vowel. More…

How to make the best use of Chinese Phonetics Express?

• (Very Important!!) First you have to become a member of Chinese Phonetics Express (CPE), which means, you will have the FULL access of CPE such as slides, uploading and comments functions only when you receive the invitation notice.

  • Follow the sequences of this website, that is: initials, finals, tones, spelling.

  • Pay attention to how a specific looks like (illustration), the shape of mouth when pronouncing the phoneme (videos), the sound of the phoneme (videos), and the illustration of the points of articulation being used to make that sound.

  • Repeat with the video loudly; record your pronunciation and upload to this site so that we can help you examine your pronunciation.

Diagram of Oral Cavity and Vocal Cords