how many letters are in the chinese alphabet?

Question

how many letters are in the chinese alphabet?

Answer 1

A currently used system for writing the sounds of Mandarin--Pinyin, or "hanyu-pinyin" Is composed of 26 letters of the Roman Alphabet, nearly identical to the English alphabet, with the one difference that a "u" with umlauts (those two little dots) is used instead of "v". "V" will sometimes be used in place of this "u".



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo



There is an older system of writing the sounds of Mandarin, which more accurately reproduces the sounds of the language called "Bopomofo" (the first four sounds in the "alphabet"). It is composed of 37 symbols. This system may still be used in some places.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo



Having said all that, Chinese writing is composed mainly of a system of Chinese characters. The idea that Chinese characters are "a series of little pictures" is outdated and inaccurate. The vast majority of characters (something like 87%) is made up of these characters that combine a phonetic or "sound component" and a meaning component.



Another outdated idea that is nonetheless perpetuated by even Chinese people themselves is that there is a near-infinite number of these characters, reaching into the tens of thousands. The reality is you can read simple stories with a repertoire of as few as 400 characters. You could read a simple newspaper article with knowledge of as few as 1500 of the most common characters (but it would be much easier going with 2000 or so).



Finally, I personally feel there's much to be said for the character approach, characters can be recognized throughout China, a country which is home to hundreds of dialects, as well as in other countries such as Japan and Korea (although meanings differ slightly). The English phonetic alphabet is simpler to learn, but in reality we end up recognizing words anyway, and not reading them as it is well known that:



(a) English is very, very often not pronounced the way it is written (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti) and,

(b) Proficient readers don't really "read" words anyway, as famously demonstrated here: http://dan.hersam.com/2005/01/27/reading-jumbled-letters/

Answer 2

Letters do not exist in Chinese. It doesn't have an alphabet. It has a unique picture-like thing for each and every single word.

Answer 3

Learn Chinese Fast and Easy!

Answer 4

the Chinese do not have an alphabet. Chinese writing is called hanzi and it's consisted of characters (kind of like pictorials) made up of different components that have their own meaning.

Answer 5

chinese writing is not called letters or alphabets theyre called chracters and there can be over 80000 chracters but not every chracters is used though

Answer 6

394

Answer 7

If you just determined to discover this well-liked language Mandarin why don’t you understand at the most common online program

Answer 8

Pinyin (Chinese: 拼音; pinyin: pīnyīn; Mandarin pronunciation: [pʰɪ́n jɪ́n]) is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet to teach Mandarin Chinese in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan.[1] It is also often used to spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters (汉字 / 漢字, hànzì) into computers.

Letters

Pinyin differs from other romanizations in several aspects, such as the following:

Syllables starting with u are written as w in place of u (e.g. uan is written as wan). Standalone u is written as wu.

Syllables starting with i are written as y in place of i (e.g. ian is written as yan). Standalone i is written as yi.

Syllables starting with ü are written as yu in place of ü (e.g. üe is written as yue).

ü is written as u when there is no ambiguity (such as ju, qu, and xu), but written as ü when there are corresponding u syllables (such as lü and nü). In such situations where there are corresponding u syllables, it is often replaced with v on a computer, making it easier to type on a standard keyboard.

When preceded by a consonant, iou, uei, and uen are simplified as iu, ui, and un (which do not represent the actual pronunciation).

As in zhuyin, what are actually pronounced as buo, puo, muo, and fuo are given a separate representation: bo, po, mo, and fo.

The apostrophe (') is used before a syllable starting with a vowel (a, o, or e) in a multiple-syllable word when the syllable does not start the word (which is most commonly realized as [ɰ]), unless the syllable immediately follows a hyphen or other dash.[19] This is done to remove ambiguity that could arise, as in Xi'an, which consists of the two syllables xi ("西") and an ("安") as opposed to xian for such words as "先". (This ambiguity does not occur when tone marks are used: The two tone marks in "Xīān" unambiguously show that the word consists of two syllables. However, even with tone marks, the city is usually spelled with an apostrophe as "Xī'ān".)

Eh alone is written as ê; elsewhere as e. Schwa is always written as e.

zh, ch, and sh can be abbreviated as ẑ, ĉ, and ŝ (z, c, s with a circumflex). However, the shorthands are rarely used due to difficulty of entering them on computers, and are confined mainly to Esperanto keyboard layouts.

ng has the uncommon shorthand of ŋ.

The letter v is unused (except in spelling foreign languages, languages of minority nationalities, and some dialects), despite a conscious effort to distribute letters more evenly than in Western languages. However, sometimes, for ease of typing into a computer, the v is used to replace a ü.

Most of the above are used to avoid ambiguity when writing words of more than one syllable in pinyin. For example uenian is written as wenyan because it is not clear which syllables make up uenian; uen-ian, uen-i-an and u-en-i-an are all possible combinations whereas wenyan is unambiguous because we, nya, etc. do not exist in pinyin. See the pinyin table article for a summary of possible pinyin syllables (not including tones).

Answer 9

3000

its unlimited.