Chinese Characters

[jte]

With the Prime's pinyin input method, one picks a syllable and a tone. For “水”, the syllable is “shui” and the tone is #3 (a.k.a. “the third tone”). Another way to show tones is with a tone marker; with a tone marker, “shui3” is written as “shuǐ”. (“Tone” has to do with how one varies one’s pitch as one speaks [in Standard Chinese for pinyin].)

Here are four examples in Simplified Chinese, with the syllable “ma”:

• 妈 (mother), “ma1” / “mā”;
• 麻 (hemp), “ma2” / “má”;
• 马 (horse), “ma3” / “mǎ”; and
• 骂 (scold), “ma4” / “mà”.
  

The fifth tone [not used in any of the four examples above] is also known as the neutral tone.

If one attempts to follow along with this thread by using the current public version of the firmware or virtual calculator, please note that some bugs have been addressed since the last release: I filed four tickets on the bug tracker for pinyin input, all four have since been closed. (Crashing after typing with a computer keyboard into the virtual calculator, incorrect tone numbers shown in the menu buttons, automatic scrolling not bringing the selection into view as a pinyin syllable is built up, and a request to remove tone numbers from the shown pinyin table [as is the case in the screenshot shown in this thread].)