Gan Chinese has 22 initials in standard romanisation. Like Mandarin, Gan uses aspirated and unaspirated stop pairs, but it also allows syllable-initial ng — a feature absent from Mandarin.
Gan dialects show variation in whether retroflex initials (zh, ch, sh) are distinguished from alveolar initials (z, c, s), with some Gan varieties merging these series.
Gan finals include simple vowels, diphthongs, and nasal-ending finals shared with Mandarin. Distinctively, Gan preserves entering-tone finals such as et and ak with stop codas — sounds lost in Mandarin over a thousand years ago.
These entering-tone finals give Gan a clipped, staccato quality in affected syllables, similar to Cantonese and Hakka, and quite different from the open syllables of Mandarin.
Gan Chinese is written in Chinese characters (Hanzi) — the same logographic script shared across all Sinitic languages. Written Gan follows standard Chinese character conventions.
The Gan romanisations shown here reveal how Gan pronunciation differs from Mandarin — for example, the Gan first-person pronoun "ngo" (我) versus Mandarin "wǒ", or "bet" for 不 preserving the entering tone.
Gan Chinese uses the same Chinese numeral characters as Mandarin, but they are pronounced with distinct Gan phonology.
Numbers like 一 (yit), 六 (liuk), 七 (qiet), 八 (bat), 十 (sip), 百 (bak) preserve entering-tone pronunciations with final stop sounds — a key feature of Gan that distinguishes it from Mandarin.
Gan Chinese writing uses standard Chinese punctuation, including full-width marks that differ from Western conventions.
The ideographic full stop (。), Chinese comma (，), and quotation marks (「」) are used consistently across all written Chinese varieties including Gan.
Every Alphabet 
Sambhu Raj Singh ·