Learning the Language 203Pinyin Wade-Giles Equivalent English
Phoneme
Ui Uay or uai ‘way’ as in ‘way’
Uo Aw ‘aw’ as in ‘pshaw’
Ng Ng ‘ng’ as in ‘hang’
Sh Shr ‘shr’ as in ‘shroud’Zh Dz, tz, or dhno English equivalent;
halfway between ‘dr’ as
in ‘drop’ and ‘dz’ as in
‘adze’Tones
In addition to the basic phonemes (building-block sounds)
of Chinese, learners will also have to come to grips with the
tones sooner or later. These are the actual musical tones used
when speaking each word. Mandarin has five tones: level,
rising, dipping, falling and neutral; Cantonese has nine. How
much the tones are emphasised varies between dialects and
between speakers. Some Chinese almost sound like they’re
singing arias every time they speak, while others have only
a slight inflection of the voice.
Tones become really important only in the relatively rare
cases where two near-homonyms (words with identical basic
pronunciation) are distinguishable only by tone, and where
the context doesn’t allow a distinction between them. The
phoneme ‘ma’, for instance, can famously—depending on the
tone—mean mother, horse, hemp, a scolding or a question,
but these meanings are unlikely to be confused even if you
leave all tones off altogether. Most businesspeople won’t
need to bother with the tones, unless they plan to get beyond
survival-level in the language.
That said, it’s worth being aware that if you’ve proudly
thrown out one of your survival phrases and all you get is a
blank look back, the problem may well be in the tones. For
instance, let’s say you’re browsing a dim shop and want to
ask the owner for more light to better see an object: “Keyi jia
deng (1st level tone) ma?”. If he simply nods and walks away,
you can be pretty sure he thought you were asking if you