Cool chart of Mandarin syllables. There are 22 initials and 35 finals. Add the four tones, and you get a theoretical maximum of 3080 possible syllables. But, as you can see from the chart, only about two-thirds of the possibilities are actually used, which means that Mandarin uses only around 2000 syllables (I didn't count). For those 2000 syllables, it has tens of thousands of characters!
Posted by David Boxenhorn at June 27, 2005 10:57 AM