In Chinese language, some pronouncing components of the characters do not indicate the pronunciation, which might be cause by two reasons. The first reason that the foreign learners who learn Chinese in China should know is that the characters with different pronunciations were chosen as the phonetic indicators as early as the pictophonetic characters were created. For instance, modern people choose山as the phonetic indicator of the character 灿. However, the pronunciations of them are totally different. There are some more of this type like the phonetic indicator 丁 of 灯, 良of 酿 and 夭of 袄 and so on.

The other reason of this change is that the pronunciations of the characters in the ancient times and the modern times have changed, making the pronunciation of the phonetic indicator no longer the same with the pronunciation of the characters of modern language. The conditions of the pronunciation changes are complicated for the students who study in Mandarin learning courses. The followings are just some simple examples. The phonetic complement of 板 is 反,which has different pronunciation with 板now. Besides, 反 can’t indicate the pronunciation of 板.

As a matter of fact, in ancient times, the initial consonant of 反 was the bilabial sound “b” or “p”. Then it was changed into the dentilabial sound “f”. As a result, the pronunciation of 反 became “fan”. Nowadays, some characters with the phonetic indicator 反 are pronounced “fan” like 饭、返、贩 and 畈 while some remain the ancient “ban” or “pan” such as 板、版、坂 and 炍. Therefore, the phonetic indicator 反 can either indicate the pronunciation of the characters or not indicate.

Let’s say another example, the phonetic indicator 非 of the character 排, both have different pronunciation with each other. In ancient Chinese language, the initial consonant was the bilabial sound “b” or “p” and then also changed into ” f “. the characters of the pronunciation with ” f ”  that the students often see when they learn Chinese language are 诽、绯、翡and 霏 while the characters of the consonant “b” or “p” are “悲、辈 and 排、徘, etc.

In addition, the differentiation of apical consonant is also frequently seen. Some characters in ancient Chinese with the apical consonants “d ” and “t” were changed into “zh”, “ch”and “sh” like the characters 镇、嗔、with the element 真.