Homophones, two words which are pronounced the same, are probably one of the hardest aspects of Chinese. People often worry about mispronouncing a word and being made fun of, but in actual Chinese a set of 1400 syllables corresponds to more than 10,000 characters, meaning you could be pronouncing a (one-syllable word) perfectly correctly and still be misunderstood.
For example, Anakin says “sha1 duo1 le.” If this was Episode II, I might understand it as 沙多了 (“There is a lot of sand”), whereas if this was Episode III, I might understand it as 杀多了 (“There is a lot of killing”). Both 杀 and 沙 are pronounced sha1, so without context or saying the fuller versions of words, e.g. 沙子 or 抹杀.
Of course, this is a source of amusement for many a Chinese children, and in the online space near-homophones are the basis of tons of jocular slang (which I will not even attempt to catalog).
Nevertheless, it is essential for a Chinese language learner to put in a little time to raise awareness of homophones and near homophones for two reasons. One, you want to remember that a particular set of characters have the same pronunciation. By chunking the characters together, it should make it easier to remember them (and their correct pronunciation), and it should also make it easier in listening to select the most appropriate interpretation of a spoken syllable. Two, you also want to highlight the differences between similar sounding characters to avoid confusion and get your tones correct. Personally speaking, my tonal awareness is pretty bad as mentally I’ve mapped most of the characters only to the toneless pinyin (as needed for typing). I also have trouble separating “-in” and “ing.” Focusing on the sets of homophones which have similar pronunciations should increase the explicit knowledge of these guys are second tone while these guys are fourth tone for when it is necessary to consciously enunciate a hanzi.
For the reasons stated above, I’ve taken all the characters involved in the HSK (new) vocabulary set and organized them into clusters of homophones. Those clusters are also organized into groups of similar sounding syllables. Duoyinzi are bracketed [] with an asterisk * indicating primary pronunciation. All of the syllables and their corresponding HSK vocabulary are presented in the following four sheets for your handy reference.
- Sheet one [“-an”, “-a”, “-ang”, the two special “-i”s]
- Sheet two [{“-i”, “-in”, “-ing”}, {“-v”, “-vn”, -“vng”}, {“-iang”, “-ia”, “-ian”}, {“-ie”, “-ve”}]
- Sheet three [{“-e”, “-o”, “-en”, “-eng”}, {“-u”, “-ong”, “-un”, “uo”}]
- Sheet four [“-ai”, “-ei”, “-ao”, “-ou”]
It took a lot of time to play with arranging them both to maximize the similarity clustering and to optimize the layout. Again, I see a few typographic issues that need fixing, but I will see if there is any demand for these before putting in even more time.