Looking at the Mandarin phonetic inventory, I can see pretty quickly that the sound system is organized differently from American English. One big difference is that Mandarin focuses a lot on aspiration instead of voicing, so sounds like p / pʰ, t / tʰ, k / kʰ are treated as separate categories. The chart also shows several alveolopalatal sounds that English doesn’t really have, like x, q, and j. These are the ones i have run into the most in my early studies, hearing them you hear in words like xī, qǐng, and jiàng. Another group is the retroflex sounds, like zh, ch, and sh, which show up in words such as zhōng and shū. Mandarin also uses ü, which doesn’t exist in English, though i have seen it in German. Even though some symbols look familiar, the chart makes it clear that Mandarin organizes sounds by place of articulation in ways that don’t line up perfectly with English categories. In addition to these sounds, Mandarin also uses the four tones to change the meaning of words. For example, mā, má, mǎ, and mà are all spelled the same, but because of the tones, they all have different meanings. This came up for me when i was practicing speaking this weekend, where chǒu means ugly and chòu means stinky. To me, the words sounded the same and it took over 5 minutes for me to get it down. The best way for me to learn the difference was to just have my speaking partner repeat it over and over and slowly, then repeat it back. This is going to be my strategy going forward because its the easiest way for me to learn the difference between the tones and sound like a native speaker. Once I am able to get the tones down, it should be easier for me to differentiate between them.
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