A Pinyin chart is the poster you might find on a classroom wall or in the back of an introductory Chinese text book showing which initials pair with which finals. Though one is not going to magically learn Chinese just by looking at it, it can be useful to see those vast swaths of nothingness indicating that certain initials only pair with certain classes of finals. As a beginner learning to distinguish “j, q, x” from “zh, ch, sh,” that information is a handy shortcut.
However, the traditional Pinyin chart only shows the combinations of initials and finals, while Chinese also has the tonal dimension to worry about. In my personal experience, it took me a long time to realize that not every syllable instantiated every possible tone. So, in order to improve upon the concept of Pinyin charts, I’ve created two demos which incorporate information about tone. The first is relatively straightforward and lists all possible* Chinese syllables. The second incorporates a bit of frequency information by highlighting syllables where the Initial-Final-Tone combination accounts for at least of half of the occurrences of the Initial-Final when ignoring tones.
I do see some minor errors on the charts, but I can’t be bothered to fix them until I get some useful feedback to make version 2.0
*within reason. Neutral tone syllables are mostly ignored except for in cases where no lexical tone exists, i.e. “me.” Also, depending on the breadth of the dictionaries consulted (especially regarding regional variants), the number of syllables can be somewhat more or less. Generally speaking, ignoring tones there are about 400 basic syllables. With tones, there are at least 1,200 syllables.