When learning Chinese Pinyin, you shall be aware of certain limitations:
1. Pinyin does not represent English pronunciation and should not be pronounced according to English conventions. You are advised to learn Pinyin phonetic conventions, bearing in mind that many sounds have no equivalents in English.
2. Since Pinyin is based only on the sounds of Mandarin Chinese, Pinyin is unsuitable for use for speakers of some other Chinese spoken dialects, because the sounds do not correspond to their speech.
3. The phonotactics of spoken Mandarin Chinese dictate a relatively small set of possible syllables and there is a potential for homonyms. Because of this, Pinyin can be ambiguous, especially when transcribing Standard Written Chinese, which uses formal constructions not often found in speech. However, this should not be an issue in the transcription of normal spoken Mandarin conversation since speakers would not use such ambiguous constructions in speech.
In the pinyin of qiāng(枪, gun), “q” is the initial, “iang” is the final, “ˉ” above the vowel a is the tone. There are 22 initials and 39 finals and 4 basiclly tones in the Chinese Pinyin System.
The China government approved the Chinese pinyin (hanyu pinyin) in 1958 and adopted in 1979. It superseded older Romanization systems such as Wade-Giles (1859; modified 1892) and Postal System Pinyin, and replaced Zhuyin as the method of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China. Chinese pinyin (hanyu pinyin) was adopted in 1979 by the ISO as the standard Romanization for modern Chinese (ISO-7098:1991). It has also been accepted by the Government of Singapore, the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and many other international institutions. It has also become a useful tool for entering Chinese language text into computers.
Chinese Hanyu Pinyin is a Romanization and not an Anglicization; that is, it uses Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin. The way these letters represent sounds in Standard Mandarin will differ from how other languages that use the Roman alphabet represent sound. For example, the sounds indicated in pinyin by 'b' and 'g' corresponds more closely to the sounds indicated by 'p' and 'k' in Western use of the Latin script.
By letting Roman characters refer to specific Chinese sounds, Chinese pinyin produces a compact and accurate Romanization, which is convenient for native Chinese speakers and scholars. However, it also means that a person who has not studied Chinese or the pinyin system is likely to severely mispronounce words, which is a less serious problem with some earlier Romanization systems such as Wade-Giles.