Chinese Pronunciation - Audio Lessons

• lay out the most basic components of the Chinese language;
• demonstrate how you can pronounce Mandarin Chinese by reading pinyin;
• expand on different ways of greeting; and
• outline the concept of Mandarin Chinese in the Culture section.

Resources for further reading:

• Top 10 hacks to help you learn Chinese faster
• Learn Chinese Online

Basic Word Units: Characters and Morphemes

While Chinese might look a bit scary, we want to make sure your Chinese learning experience is the complete opposite of scary by approaching important grammatical and structural topics with plenty of examples and sentences that you can use in real life.

Being able to speak the language in any circumstance makes it less intimidating, and certainly helps boost your confidence! With Chinese becoming increasingly popular around the world, we are here to provide you with the right kind of knowledge and cultural insights, so you can have fun practicing. So without any further ado, let’s get started!

Now, if you haven't already noticed, Chinese is not an alphabet-based language. This means that words are not made of letters. So how are words formed? Well, with characters! Each Chinese “character” or 汉字 (Hànzì) is one syllable, and it takes up one full space on your digital device (whereas each Latin letter takes up half of a full space).

Words can also be comprised of “morphemes”, or 语素 (yǔsù), which are the smallest meaningful unit of a language. Morphemes can consist of one character or of more than one. Complicated? Don’t worry, we’ll dive right into some examples soon to illustrate.

Chinese Characters: 汉字 (Hànzì)

Let’s break down the word 汉字 (Hànzì) as an example. A single character is called a 字 (zì) while the character in front of it, 汉 (Hàn), actually depicts the biggest racial group in China, who are 汉人 (Hànrén), or “Chinese people.” When you put 汉 (Hàn) and 字 (zì) together, you get the word that means “Chinese characters.”

Here’s another modern-day example to help you grasp the concept.

One of the words for “computer” is 电脑 (diànnǎo), which is comprised of two characters: 电 (diàn) and 脑 (nǎo). Interestingly, the second character 脑 (nǎo) means “brains,” and the first character 电 carries the meanings of “electricity” and “electronics” when it is put with other characters in a word.

As we go along, you will see us providing “literal” meanings or translations from time to time to help you recognize what each character means. For now, just remember that each character represents a meaning, and we can put these characters together to create words and sentences.

Now it’s time to take a look at the other type of structure in a Chinese word: morphemes.

Morphemes: 语素 (Yǔsù)

Morphemes are the most basic meaning-bearing unit that you can find in the Chinese language. They could be one character (one syllable) or more (more than one syllable). While a 字 (zì) is a single character, a morpheme can be two words or sometimes more that together formulate a meaning.

For example, these characters below all make up morphemes:

For the morphemes that are made up of more than one character, you can’t really separate the characters because they only carry the particular meaning when put together. Good examples of this are “tulip” and “daikon.”

At the same time, there are also “free morphemes.” These occur when the character in a morpheme can appear on its own with an individual meaning. For example, the word 蛋 (dàn) means “eggs” on its own and the word 糕 (gāo) means “pastries” on its own. But when you put them together, 蛋糕 (dàngāo) means “cakes.” Makes sense, right?

So now you know that Chinese in written form is actually no more than characters and morphemes. Nothing terribly hard on its own, really. The tricky part is learning how to recognize characters and pronounce them, which brings us to the topic of the next section: pinyin!

Pinyin: 拼音 (pīnyīn)

When native speakers start learning Chinese at home and at school, they don’t immediately start writing or reading the characters. In fact, when natives encounter a new character that they are not familiar with, they use 拼音 (pīnyīn) to help with the correct pronunciation and tone.

Let’s take the word 拼音 (pīnyīn) itself as an example. The Latin letters “pin” and “yin” indicate the pronunciation, while the accent marks above the vowels show you the tone they should be spoken in (in this case, it’s the first tone).

If we step back a little and look at the word 电脑 (diànnǎo) again, you will find that in 电 (diàn), the fourth tone is indicated with a ˋon top of the letter “a”, while in 脑 (nǎo), the third tone is indicated with a ˇ on the letter “a.”

Can you hear the difference in tone? Let’s find out more.

Pronouncing Modern Chinese

Chinese is different from alphabetic languages in that its written form is not directly related to its pronunciation.

The audible units of modern Chinese are "syllables" made up of three parts:

• an "initial" component (which is like a consonant in English)
• a "final" component (which is like a vowel in English)
• a tone

Chinese is a "tonal language", which means that the way a sound is pronounced directly affects its meaning. Other languages use tone as well, but in a different way; for example, in English, tone is used to convey the attitude or feeling of a speaker or whether they are making a statement, question, warning or command. Try saying these two examples aloud:

Water?

Water.

In the first example, you would have had a high tone to show that it’s a question, as in “Do you want some water?”

Whereas in the second example, you would have had a flatter tone to show that it’s a statement, not a question.

Chinese Tones & Accents:

1. First tone = flat or high level
2. Second tone = rising or high rising
3. Third tone = falling-rising or low
4. Fourth tone = falling or high-falling
5. Neutral tone = short and crisp

When writing, we use the following accent marks on the main vowel to indicate tone:

• For the first tone we use a macron: [ ˉ ] ā ē ī ō ū.
• For the second we use an acute accent: [ ˊ ] á é í ó ú.
• For the third we use a caron/háček: [ ˇ ] ǎ ě ǐ ǒ ǔ.
• For the fourth we use a grave accent: [ ˋ ] à è ì ò ù.
• And for neutral tone, things stay… well, neutral: [ ] a e i o u.

Neutral tone appears significantly less often than the other four, so we will be learning only the first to the fourth tones in this lesson.

For now, let's take a look at how things work. Let’s take the morpheme “ma” and hear it in the four different tones:

See how the meaning changes with each tone? Let’s try a few more:

Numbers After the Tonal Vowel

Sometimes you might see numbers used directly after the tonal vowel, instead of an accent. For example:

妈 (ma1) “mother”

麻 (ma2) “hemp”

马 (ma3) “horse”

骂 (ma4) “to curse”

and

埃 (a1i) “dust”

癌 (a2i) “cancer”

矮 (a3i) “short”

爱 (a41) “love”

Notice how the number comes right after each tonal vowel instead of at the end of every syllable? It’s the same as using accent marks to indicate the tone. But don’t worry too much about this, computers usually automatically display tones where they should be.

What you should keep in mind is that a difference in tone with the same pronunciation can drastically change the meaning of the character. The last thing you want is “I love you” to sound like “I cancer you!” So definitely try to do your best in distinguishing the tones in Chinese. But hey, this part really is as hard as spoken Chinese gets, so now that you know this, you know where and how to be accurate.