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1. By applying the four tones to the sounds, Standard Mandarin makes a total of around 1,600 unique syllables.
2. The pronunciation of Chinese Pinyin is generally given in terms of initials and finals, which represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language, rather than letter by letter.
3. A Mandarin syllable consists of three components: an initial, a final and a tone.
4. Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of semivowels coming before the vowel, the nucleus vowel, and final vowel or consonant.
5. There are four main tones and a neutral tone (轻声qīngshēng) in Mandarin.
6. Pinyin is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcription to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin.
7. So, even if you can pronounce the pinyin of a Chinese character correctly but if you do not master tones, Chinese speakers will not understand you.
8. This fact makes the tone training a fundamentally important part of Mandarin learners.
9. Pronunciation of Mandarin comes with two aspects: syllables and tones.
10. Each can be practised separately, but when it comes to speaking, learners must pronounce words with proper tones.
11. The same syllable can have 5 possible ways to pronounce by varying the tone (pitch).
12. A semivowel is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.
13. Combinations of initials and finals, and the special cases result in more than 400 mono-syllabic sounds.