Mandarin Chinese is a category of Chinese dialects spoken across most ofnorthern and southwestern China. The term "Mandarin" can also referto Standard Mandarin, which is based on the Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing.It is considered to be the standard for the People’s Republic of China. In 1.2billion speakers Chinese language family, native mandarin Chinese speakers account for 70%,outnumbering any other languages in the world.
The complexity of Chinese characters discourages many would-be students from learning Chinese; however, it is notnecessary to learn characters in order to speak Chinese. Chinese pinyin is system of using roman characters plus tonemarks to write Chinese. "Hanyu" is the word for the Chinese language,and "pinyin" literally means "joining sounds together".Each syllable in Mandarin Chinese can be written as an "initial"sound, a "final sound", plus a tone. There are four voiced tones inMandarin, plus a neutral tone.

Chinese pinyin is a Roman-letter basedsystem that China now uses to mark the pronunciation of Chinese characters.With four tones and pinyin, any Chinese characters can be pronounced precisely.In many cases, Pinyin is quite intuitive to English speakers with only a fewexceptions. However, it can be a twist to render Pinyin in four tones forpeople who just start. Chinese pinyin is made up of 2 tables: vowel table andconsonant table. Vowel Table:

a	o	e	i	u	ϋ
ai	ei	ui
ao	ou	iu
ie	ue	er
an	en	in	un	ϋn
ang	eng	ing	ong

Consonant Table: b p m f d t n l g k h j qx z c s r zh ch sh y w
When learning Chinese Pinyin,you shall be aware of certain limitations:
First, Chinese pinyin is a way to representChinese characters and express the sounds in the Chinese language using thealphabet. There are other systems to express Mandarin, but Pinyin is the mostaccepted and widely used. Once you learn Pinyin you will know how to pronounceany word in Mandarin using a Chinese dictionary. Pinyin is also the most commonway to input Chinese charactersinto a computer. Although Pinyin and English both use the Roman alphabet, manyletters are not expressed with the same sounds that English uses.
Second, since Chinese pinyin is based onlyon the sounds of Mandarin Chinese, Pinyin is unsuitable for use for speakers ofsome other Chinese spoken dialects, because the sounds do not correspond totheir speech.
Third, the phonotactics of spoken MandarinChinese dictate a relatively small set of possible syllables and there is apotential for homonyms. Because of this, Pinyin can be ambiguous, especiallywhen transcribing Standard Written Chinese, which uses formal constructions notoften found in speech. However, this should not be an issue in thetranscription of normal spoken Mandarin conversation since speakers would notuse such ambiguous constructions in speech.