In The Begining It all started when I was conducting a Chinese language class in Sydney to a group of students some years ago. The class went well until I saw dark cloud of confusion hovering above my students' faces. It was quite certain that I was falling into every teacher's nightmare: you are losing your students and they think you are stupid. I was teaching them how to say "morning", "noon" and "afternoon" in Chinese and they just couldn't get it. I stopped and asked what was it that made everyone miserable. One of the students came up and gave the answer: "Why five?" he said, "why up five is morning and down five is afternoon?" Do you get it? The students remembered the lesson I taught them earlier, in which they had learnt how to count numbers in Chinese and the number 5 pronounced "wu". Now the Chinese words for "morning, noon, afternoon" all contain the sound "wu". They paid no attention to the writings and only concentrated on the sound, which is a common thing among Chinese language students when they only just started to learn it. Of cause I then explained this "wu" is not that "wu". The students were still not satisfied. They feel that it is quite strange for the Chinese to have so many words with no similarity at all to share one exact syllable and they wanted to know the details. The Task Unfortunately the Chinese are not people of percision and they are really no good when come to quantified expression. I have determined to be an exception. It took me more than five years and some quite hard time to become one. Now my toil has come to the end and the jugement is yours. I can only hope that The Mandarin Syllable Chart will be helpfull to you and I eagerly waiting for your generous and frank comments. I just want you to know that I understand how hard to learn a foreign language and I am more than happy to offer my further assistance with my full effort whenever you need it.

The Chart shows detailed information about the syllable "wu": it carries 28 frequently used Chinese characters and has 4 tone variations.The writing example is in the up-right corner; the number "3" indicates the symbol is in third tone. In the character list you shall find exactly what the 28 "wu"s are and how many of them do you know. It is always a great challenge for every student to memorize all these Chinese characters.The only effective way to deal with it is to remember them in a context, or anything can link them together. The Chart offers you two more chances to tackle the task: link them by same sounds and by similar writings. Try it, you will know what I mean. To see the Chart in full screen view, click HERE.

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