Quote Originally Posted by euphonius View Post
Each of these links has a "listen" button where you can hear the words pronounced in standard Mandarin.

Qingqi = cheeng chee. the Q is called a sibilant and to do it right the tip of your tongue is behind your bottom front teeth so it's highly aspirated. It's aways followed by a high vowel.

Zongshen = dzung shunn. the Z is is not unlike the Z sound in english but it has a hard start -- an affricate as opposed to a fricative.

Xingyue = Hseeng yooeh. Like the Q, the X is sibilant, tip of tongue behind lower front teeth.

Jialing = jyah ling. Truth be told, J is also a sibilant.

Pinyin is not hard to learn, but there are several letter and combinations that are conventions for sounds that do not exist in English/western languages. So you have to learn them, rather than just speak them as if they were English.

The beauty of Q and X are that they have no innate sound in English, so they can be conveniently assigned to sounds in Chinese that don't exist in English/Western language. The danger is that folks see Q and X and relate them to western/English words in which they appear, like queen or xylophone. Unfortunately, those both fail!

Class dismissed.
That's so cool. I'm sure I'm not the only one who are so impressed.
ps I guess i wouldn't surprise anyone for speaking English, but i feel incredible for a foreigner fluent in Mandarin.