a, a1, a2, a3, a4 (exclamation word/auxiliary word): a. ①a, zhen1 mei3! ②zu3 guo2 a, mu3 qin1!
a1 (used in personal names): a1. ①A1 Fan2 Ti2. ②A1 Shi1 Ma3. ③A1 Qing4 Sao3.
ai1 (1.dust; 2.sigh): ai1. ① qem2 ai1. ②ai1 shing1 tuan4 qi4.
ai1 (exclamation word): ei [ei]. ①ei yo, wo3 wang4 le guan1 men2. Listen.
This is a proposal for development of the han4yu3pin1yin1 (Chinese language spelling sounds), or PinYin for short. In the Chinese character writing system (HanZi), homophonic words are represented by different HanZi. This phenomenon is taken into consideration in this design. The standard Chinese is different in various periods of history. Chinese language in the future will be different from what is currently spoken. Language change is also taken into consideration in this design. This dictionary is intended to prove that an alphabetic script facilitates language change towards more phonological distinction.
A friend of mine is teaching her grandson Mandarin. The way she is doing it is to write out the Xī yóu jì (Journey to the West) in a simple báihuà paraphrase using Pinyin only (with glosses in English for new vocabulary). My friend is a first-generation immigrant to America, and her daughter married a German who was studying in the United States, so that makes the grandson third-generation Chinese-American/German.
What is “pinyin”?Pinyin is the Romanization (using “abc” alphabet) of Chinese words to assist foreigners with learning the language.There are other systems to express Mandarin, but Pinyin is the most accepted and widely used. Once you learn Pinyin you will know how to pronounce any word in Mandarin using a Chinese dictionary.