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]

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!