> Alan alanandmike.com> writes:

>> I thought I heard Bob Costas say "BEI JING" last night, but either I
>> misheard or he accidentally said it more-or-less correctly; he went
>> back to "bay-zhing" for the rest of the night.

>

>> Lew, I've never been able to make sense of the phonological
>> directions. Even sounds I already know how to make!

>
> If you go to
>
>  http://www.zein.se/patrick/chinen8p.html#pinyin
>
> and follow the links in the table headed "In Mandarin Chinese there
> are 21 initial sounds:" that explain terms like "palatal",
> "retroflex", and so on, you can get an idea of the difference
> between J and ZH, among other things.
>
> The whole site
>
>  http://www.zein.se/patrick/chinen8p.html
>
> is good on a lot of aspects of Mandarin phonology, but I think the
> author sometimes gets sloppy when picking sounds in English to compare
> Mandarin sounds to.
>
> /Lew
> ---
> Lew Perin / pe...@acm.orghttp://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html