🇨🇳 Chinese Pronunciation

Practice chinese pronunciation using Web Speech API. Record yourself, get instant feedback on accuracy, fluency, and confidence.

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💡 Chinese Pronunciation Tips

🎤 Four Tones

Mandarin has 4 tones. Practice pitch patterns for same syllables.

🗣️ Aspirated Consonants

Distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated sounds.

📝 Daily Practice

Tone drills significantly improve fluency.

Tones are the real work

Mandarin has relatively few syllables and a straightforward sound system, but each syllable carries a tone that changes the meaning of the word. This is unfamiliar to English speakers, who use pitch to convey attitude and sentence type rather than lexical meaning, and it is where almost all the learning effort goes.

Tone	Contour	Mark	Example	Meaning
First	High and level	mā	妈	mother
Second	Rising	má	麻	hemp
Third	Falling then rising, often just low	mǎ	马	horse
Fourth	Sharp fall	mà	骂	to scold
Neutral	Short, unstressed	ma	吗	question particle

The first tone is the one English speakers find hardest to sustain, because English pitch naturally drifts downward across an utterance. Holding a genuinely level pitch requires conscious effort at first.

Tone change rules

Two third tones in a row: the first becomes a second tone. 你好 is written nǐ hǎo but pronounced ní hǎo.
不 bù becomes bú before a fourth tone: bú shì.
一 yī becomes yì before first, second and third tones, and yí before a fourth tone.

Pinyin spellings that mislead English speakers

Pinyin	Actual sound	Not
q	like ch but with the tongue flat against the palate	a k sound
x	like sh with the tongue flat and forward	a ks sound
zh, ch, sh	retroflex — tongue tip curled back	English j, ch, sh
c	`/ts/` as in cats	a k or s sound
z	`/dz/` as in beds	English z
r	retroflex approximant with friction	English r
e	`/ɤ/`, an unrounded back vowel	English eh
ü	tongue as for ee, lips rounded	English oo

Syllable structure is simple

Mandarin syllables consist of an optional initial consonant, a vowel or diphthong, and optionally a final /n/ or /ŋ/. There are no consonant clusters at all, and only two consonants can end a syllable. This is far simpler than English, and it is why Mandarin speakers learning English find clusters such as strengths so difficult in the other direction.

How to practise tones

Learn tones as part of the word from the first encounter. Adding them later almost never works.
Practise tone pairs rather than isolated syllables, since the transitions are where errors appear.
Exaggerate during practice. Learners consistently under-produce pitch movement, so an exaggerated version usually lands close to the natural target.
Record yourself and compare against a model, since you cannot hear your own pitch reliably while speaking.

In-depth Mandarin Chinese guides

Each guide covers one part of the sound system in detail, with audio examples and a practice drill.