How could answer this question in Chinese? write: zh ch shi r, 5 times for each initial and final.

Explanation:

In this first article we’ll look at Zh, Ch, Sh and R. In the next article we’ll cover Z, C, S.

These sound are mainly “difficult” because they are not pronounced how we would expect them to be in English. The fact that Roman letters are used just makes it confusing. That’s one of the weaknesses of pinyin. For a number of the sounds the letters are the same or at least very close to the English sound that uses the same letter.

Now we’re at the point where we need to totally ignore the fact that these letters exist in English and try to remove any sound associations we already have. C for example is pronounced closer to “ts”, nothing like the English c.

The good news is that if we relate these sounds to other Chinese sounds we have already learned our task is much simpler. This little hack will help us get a grip with these sounds a lot quicker than if we work from English sounds.