Taken partly from: http://weber.ucsd.edu/%7Edkjordan/chin/pinyin1.html

Pronunciation

Chinese uses about 1000 syllables to express about 50,000 characters, so naturally, there are many homonyms. The meanings are differentiated in the spoken language through the context or by adding a syllable of similar meaning to create "words". But in the written language each of those meanings can be represented by a different character. Thus it has always been possible to write a thought with fewer signs than the number of syllables it took to speak it.

When Chinese words are represented in Western languages, the challenge is to represent them in Latin letters. It is impractical to use a phonetic system to represent all the information presented in a written ideograph, so all such systems are merely an approximation of the Chinese spoken language (usually the official "Mandarin"), and are mostly used as a pronunciation guide and as a simpler identification for Western audiences. To that purpose, the official PinYin ("phonetic") system of Romanization is one of the most practical in that its spellings (1) are generally shorter than spellings in other systems and (2) are closer to Chinese language intuitions than other systems are. But for an outsider PinYin can be confusing because the same letter does not always correspond to the same sound, and because some of the sounds rarely occur outside of Mandarin Chinese.

Reading Pinyin

For a speaker of American English, there are only a few sets of consonants and vowels that pose a problem. The palatal j, q, x, and the retroflex zh, ch, sh, r, require the tongue to be be either in the extreme front tip of the mouth (the pallete) or far back in the throat. The vowels can be confusing, since the e sounds like an "uh", the i sounds like "ee", and the u sounds like "oo". For those with some familiarity with European languages, the o is an Italian o, and the ü is a French u or a German ü.

Consonants
Palatal	j jeans	q cheat	x sheet
Retroflex	zh judge	ch lurch	sh shame	r azure
Slight difference	z fads	c hats	s	h ach!
Same As American English	p	t	k
	b	d	g
	l	m	n
	f	w	y

Vowels and Finals
	-a	-e	-i	-o	-u	-n	-ng	extended finals
a ah			ai aye	ao ow		an ahn	ang angst
e lush			ei bay			en taken	eng hung
i ee	ia ya	ie yet			iu leo	in keen	ing sing	ian, iang, iao, iong
o cold					ou oh		ong lone
u oo	ua wa		ui way	uo AWOL		un w'nter		uan, uang, uai
ü		üe ü-ye				ün ü-ng		üan

Idiosyncracies of the PinYin system:

a, when used in ian and üan, represents a sound between a and e, like the e in get.

e, when used in ie, represents the same sound between a and e as ian and get.

i is virtually silent and serves to "complete" the consonant, making the following consonants sound more extended: zz, cz, sz; zhr, chr, shr, rr; h.

i and u may never occur as an initial letter of a syllable. i->y, u->w. Thus, to denote a solitary "i" or "u" sound it is always written as "yi" and "wu"

o, after b, p, m, f, makes an "uo" sound.

u, when following j, x, q, y, is actually ü. This is because the u sound does not naturally occur in those cases. Thus, ju is actually jü, yue is actually yüe.

The ü sound only occurs in two cases: after j, x, q, y (see above); and after n, l. It is only in the case of n and l that both u and ü sounds are possible and the umlaut ü indicated. Nu and nü are two different sounds.

Difficult Distinctions:

c and s

j and r, j and zh

x and sh, q and ch

Tones

Tones are perhaps one of the hardest pronunciation aspects to learn, but a major recognition factor for natives. Consonants such as z/zh or l/n may be difficult to distinguish due to dialectal differences, but tones are much easier to distinguish. Tones are pitch patterns. Standard Mandarin has four tones, which are often represented in Romanized text by numbers or diacritical marks.

	description	example
1st tone	high pitch, remaining even throughout the syllable. like singing a "G": la~
2nd tone	short rising pitch, starting low and rising throughout the syllable like asking a question, "huh?"
3rd tone isolated/ concluding:	falling pitch, starting at about mid-range, dropping, then rising sharply like questioning, "uh - huh ?"
before another syllable:	drops, but stays low almost as if two syllables: drop, linger, lift. like assenting, "uh - huh, yeah."
before another 3rd tone:	second tone
4th tone	sharply falling pitch, from high to low. like an expletive: hey! *however, try to achieve the precipitous drop in pitch without yelling
no mark	a neutral, short, unstressed syllable, which usually takes an even pitch from the endpoint of the previous syllable.

Tones are marked above a vowel in each syllable:

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