Learn Mandarin, Part 3.

So back to lesson 1.

How do you pronounce (and read)
'n.ee2 h.ow3' ?

Well it's a little like "knee how" except with the addition of tones. I've taken the 37 symbols of the Mandarin phonetic alphabet (sometimes called buhpuhmuhfuh) and given each one an 'English' alternative using one or more of the 26 letters of the alphabet we are used to.

b
p
m
f
d
t
n
l
g
k
h
j
ch
sh
jr
chr
shr
r
dz
ts
s
ee
oo
ui
u
aw
uh
e
igh
ay
ow
oa
uhn
Uhn
ung
Ung
err

And that is almost the total number of distinct sounds that are pronounced in Mandarin.
Between each sound, I put a period to avoid confusion when multiple vowels are combined together. For example, the Mandarin word for "me" or "I" is pronounced like "war". It's a combination of 2 sounds from the list above, 'oo' and 'aw'. I could therefore write them like this:

'ooaw'

but that' could get confusing, so I'll write them like this

'oo.aw'

instead.

So back to lesson one (again!)

'n.ee2 h.ow3' (knee how) = "hello"

What's with the numbers? Well, these are to tell you what tones to use. 'n.ee' is pronounced with the rising second tone, and 'h.ow' is pronounced with the falling and rising third tone. For now though, you can just ignore those numbers.