>Take the first letter, d, for example. That's not a d like you would understand it in other latin-letter-based languages. It's actually more like a t. And actu

>Take the first letter, d, for example. That's not a d like you would understand it in other latin-letter-based languages. It's actually more like a t. And actually it's not even like a t, it's more like an unaspirated t. That issue is by no means unique to pinyin. "S" and "W" in German sound more like "Z" and "V" in English. Colloquial French has half a dozen ways of pronouncing "R", all of them utterly unfamiliar to most English speakers. If you're under the misapprehension that these symbols represent familiar phonemes, then you've simply been badly taught.