The Chinese phonetic alphabet is called "Hanyu Pinyin" in Mandarin Chinese.

The Chinese syllable is usually composed of an initial and a final, and each syllable has four different tones.

The initial is a consonant that begins the syllable and the final is the rest of the syllable, for example, "bang" in which "b" is an initial and "ang" is a final.

There are 23 initials in Chinese:

1. b; 2. c; 3. ch; 4. d; 5. f; 6. g; 7. h; 8. j; 9. k; 10. l;

11. m; 12. n; 13. p; 14. q; 15. r; 16. s; 17. sh; 18. t; 19. w; 20. x;

21. y; 22. z; 23. zh

Please bear this in mind: The Chinese initials are not syllabic sounds. No word in Chinese consists of only an initial.

There are 35 finals in Chinese:

1. a; 2. ai; 3. an; 4. ang; 5. ao; 6. e; 7. ei; 8. en; 9. eng; 10. er

11. i; 12. ia; 13. ian; 14. iang; 15. iao; 16. ie; 17. in; 18. ing; 19. iong; 20. iu;

21. o; 22. ong; 23. ou; 24. u; 25. ua; 26. uai; 27. uan; 28. uang; 29. ui; 30. un;

31. uo; 32. ü; 33. üan; 34. üe; 35. ün

You may have noticed that most of the finals in the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet are combinations of more than one vowel sound instead of a single vowel sound.

A final in Chinese is a vowel, which may be a simple vowel (simple final) or a compound vowel (compound final), or a vowel plus a nasal consonant (nasal final). Some syllables may be without an initial, for example, "a" (a modal particle), but no syllable can do without a final.