Reading Chinese Menus: Concepts: Pronunciation guides

[kake]

Today I want to round up some useful links regarding Mandarin pronunciation.

One article that I came across fairly early on in my learning process, but wasn't able to make use of until later, is the Sinosplice article on Mandarin pronunciation. The details of the discussion are perhaps a bit too advanced for a beginner, but reading it now as someone who has spent some time listening to fluent Mandarin speakers, I find it very useful in explaining some of the things that seemed inconsistent at first.

For pronunciation of specific words/characters, Forvo is worth a look. It's a crowdsourced collection of pronunciations of various words in different languages, and it has reasonable coverage of Mandarin. The thing I like about it is that it collects a number of different people's pronunciations of each word, and also tells you roughly where in the world each person is from. Make sure that you listen to the Mandarin (listed as "Chinese") pronunciation of the word, not the Cantonese, Hakka, etc.

Another option is the Our Chinese reading tool (thanks to sunflower for the link). This is for individual characters only; although it lets you enter words, it doesn't take tone sandhi into account, which can be misleading. The MandarinTools entries that I link to from my character posts also fail to take tone sandhi into account, but are useful for individual characters. However, YellowBridge, which I also link to, does seem to make sure to incorporate tone sandhi into its pronuniciations.

One point to remember is that different people have different accents in Mandarin, just as they do in English. I've noticed that the presenters on the cookery programme 天天飲食 have what I believe is a Beijing accent, with lots of retroflex "rrrr"ing at the ends of words, and a completely different pronunciation of words such as 黑 (hēi/black) in comparison to other sources (example video on YouTube, around 0:48 and again around 1:10 and 1:30 and several times after that). Here's a blog post I found on the subject, if you're interested.

Related posts:

• tone sandhi,
• the multiple uses of "i"

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

黑 sounds very standard to me and I don‘t recall having it ever heard differently。 Do you have a link that shows the other pronunciation of 黑？

Thanks，
Max

[kake]

Try the links in the post :) Forvo and YellowBridge have the pronunciation I learned first, while Our Chinese is more similar to the 天天飲食 presenters.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know, apart from the Forvo one being overpronounced they sound similar to me.. where do you hear the difference?

-Max

[kake]

The vowel is different — in some cases it's eɪ (as in FACE) while in others it's iː (as in FLEECE). In the eɪ cases there's also more "catarrh-clearing" (I don't know the proper linguistic term) in the consonant.

[(Anonymous)]

So that really irritated me, so I listened again, and also let my girlfriend listen, who is a native Mandarin speaker, and the video sounds to both of us absolutely normal and '准确'. Is anyone else hearing anything funny there or not?

Max

[kake]

Oh, I'm not saying the pronunciation in the video is wrong! Just that it's different from the pronunciation on e.g. Forvo.

Do you hear the vowel in the Forvo one as eɪ or as iː? And can you recognise the difference in the consonant?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not saying you said that :) I just mean it's 准确, as in 'not-un-standard' ;)

Sorry, those symbols don't really tell me anything. For me, both the consonants and the vowels of the recording on Forvo and from the man+woman in the video sound the same.

-Max

[kake]

Well, I explained the symbols in my previous comment: eɪ is the vowel in FACE, and iː is the vowel in FLEECE. The difference I'm talking about is similar to the difference between the English word "hay" and the English word (well, sort of a word) "hee".

I think what may be happening is that there is a continuum between eɪ and iː, and you and I put the boundary between them in different places. Try pronouncing "hay" but keep going on the vowel (as if you were singing it on a long note), and then gradually change it to "hee", but pay attention to the way your mouth is changing shape internally as you do so; it should gradually close up towards the back.

Now, when the consonant in 黑 becomes more guttural, the mouth cavity has to close up more towards the back in order to do this, so the following vowel becomes more like iː (i.e. hee), whereas in a speaker who doesn't have the guttural "h", the mouth can be more open and hence the vowel remains more like eɪ (i.e. "hay").

I hope this helps somewhat!

[(Anonymous)]

That was very helpful, thank you very much! Sorry for overlooking your prior explanation of the symbols, I must have skipped over them and just have read the explanation. Your explanation of the different pronunciations makes sense too; I still don't really hear much of a difference, but you seem to be more aware of these things than me :)

Thanks again!
Max

[kake]

You're welcome!

[sunflower-recipes.blogspot.com]

To learn Chinese pronouciation correctly you will need to learn how to pronounce each word either by Hanyu Pinyin (new style using English alphabets) or the traditional zhuyin fuhao (the old method using Chinese symbols). Each word like English is made up of a consonant and a vowel and also controlled by the level of tone identified by the little tone mark 0 - 4, from flat tone - high - neutral. Thus the same pinyin with different marks can read differently and relate to different Chinese characters.

This is a good example to learn the different pinyin and fuhou
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mandarin_pts.htm click on the play bar to learn the sound.

I don't normally use the tone mark much when translating Chinese simply because unless you know how to differentiate the marking or tone there is no point using them. I also deviate using correct hanyu pinyi like the word 菜 (vegetable) should be 'cài' but if you try to pronounce it by plain English it becomes 'kai' and not 'chai'

Google has good translation tool to read the whole sentence and with added hanyu pinyin

http://translate.google.com/#


Chinese is like English which there is this proper Queen English there is also standard spoken Mandarin recognised and spoken the same way anywhere in the world. Mandarin can be spoken differently influenced by local dialets even in Beijing there is distinct Mandarin slang compared to that spoken in Shanghai or other places.

Other than Mandarin there are hundreds of different spoken Chinese (dialets) totally different to Mandarin like Cantonese, Fujian, Hakka, Chouzhou etc.....

Sorry a bit long to explain.

By the way re your pinyin on your last post for 蚵 (háo) is not correct, the correct pinyin is hé (or 'hur' spoken in plain English), it is more commonly used in Taiwan referring to oyster, but in their Taiwanese dialet or Fujian (Hokkien) it is read as 'oh'

[kake]

Thank you for the links! I find this video quite useful too, since you can see the shape of the speaker's mouth.

I do find it easier to understand when people include the tone marks on the pinyin (though easiest of all is when they use the characters). I talked to a friend about this a while back in the context of leaving out the accents when writing Swedish, and she said a native speaker will understand it, but it's harder for a beginner — I hadn't thought of it that way before, but it makes a lot more sense to me now I've started learning Mandarin.

I would actually consider RP (received pronunciation/Queen's English) to be an accent in itself rather than a standard — the idea of it being "standard English" is a bit old-fashioned now, I think.

Thanks also for the correction re 蚵 — I will go and edit the posts now to fix it! I'm not sure where I got the idea that háo was correct.

[vatine]

Accent marks in written Swedish are, unfortunately, a messy business. Sometimes, they denote a difference in meaning, sometimes they denote a difference in meaning and pronunciation and sometimes they're plain not there (and putting them in would look strange to a native eye).

Of course, the noun-compounding habits of Swedish (and mostly leaving out any binding dash) also makes for amusing misreadings from time to time.

[kake]

Interesting, thanks, I didn't know that — I thought it was all about meaning.

[vatine]

Meaning and pronunciation: "armen"/"armén" (the arm / the army)
Meaning only: "allen"/"allén" (alone / avenue (in the "tree-lined road" sense)), both pronounced the same way.
Not present: "tomten" (could be a plot of land, could be a mythical small-folk helping out on a farm, could be Santa Claus; there's a pronunciation difference between #1 and #2/#3 and the Swedish Father Christmas is but a larger, more boisterous, variant of the former, if you delve deep enough into history)

Then there's a whole slew of compound words without any join-markings that can be decomposed in at least two ways.

[pne]

Google has good translation tool to read the whole sentence and with added hanyu pinyin

http://translate.google.com/#

Although their "shi" sounds suspicious to me; it sounds as if it has an "i" sound at the ending (English "ee"), as in "xi", rather than the "shrr" sound I would expect.

(I haven't checked what "zhi chi ri" sound like.)

[(Anonymous)]

You just might be used to a very Northern pronunciation ;)

-Max

[kake]

It's hard to tell, but it almost sounds more like ɪ... definitely sounds a bit odd though.

[(Anonymous)]

Same here. I have not the least clue when it comes to linguistics, but my Mandarin listening is decent and I also asked my gf again and she confirms: the 是 of gTranslate 朗读 is just fine. Either you guys come from a totally linguistic background so that you can hear differences in the pronunciation that me and my gf can't distinguish, or you're hearing something that isn't there.. ^^

[kake]

I think part of the weirdness is that machine speech can't take into account the natural flexibility that occurs when a syllable is pronounced in context with other syllables — this is why sentences constructed from a selection of prerecorded words/syllables often sound a bit stilted. So because their 是 has to fit into many different sentences, it doesn't sound like it would sound if pronounced in isolation. Specifically, it sounds a bit "cut off" at the end to me, making it hard to definitively identify the vowel. Have a listen to Google Translate speaking some English, and you may see what I mean.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, absolutely, I'm not saying it doesn't sound robotic and stilted :) But I still think that gTranslates 是　is simply standard Mandarin, and the original poster is just used to Northern (Beijing / Dongbei / Inner Mongolia / ...) pronunciation, in which you curl the tongue much further back into your mouth, which leads to 'shrrr' instead of 'shi'.

-Max