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

[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.