Pronunciation is of vital importance especially in mandarin. Initials, finals, and tones are combined in fixed ways to produce a total of 1,600 possible distinct syllable sounds in Chinese (compare to 16,000 for English and 100 for Japanese). As long as you pronounce one syllable sound wrong, you can get a completely different word. This article will focus on initials, to examine English speakers’ difficulties and give tips to improve pronunciation. Mandarin initial sounds are composed by ...