|
Pinyin | shí (second tone) |
| English | 10; ten |
| Pronunciation is a bit tricky as it's more like 'shur' than anything else. |
A memorable character as you just have to remember that the Roman numeral for ten is X and then just rotate the symbol and you get the Chinese character for ten.
Distinguished from shi (correct) only by tone marks so you have to be careful with those tones.
In fact the 'shi' sound is one of the most frequently used in Chinese and the same basic sound with its four tones variants leads to fifty listings for the
character in my dictionary all
pronounced as shi (including lion, pledge, room, business, power, official, market, arrow, pig, eat, stone ....).
This demonstrates how pinyin struggles to be useful on its own, you really need the written character to tell them apart.
