Pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese using IPA (Beijing)

This video goes into detail using the IPA symbols to learn how to pronounce the sounds of standard Mandarin, also known as Beijing Mandarin. I describe some pitfalls that some people have, show you the relationships between groups of sounds and how they are structured. I also tell you how these are written in Pinyin.

For more information about the individual pronunciation of the IPA characters, please refer to my IPA pronunciation videos.

Glossika Language Training blog on Facebook has many more language resources published there.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Glossika-Language-Training/

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Chinese pronunciation
• Mandarin pronunciation
• IPA symbols
• how to pronounce Chinese
• correct Chinese pronunciation
• IPA pronunciation
• Pinyin pronunciation
• correct pinyin pronunciation
• how to pronounce pinyin

[mh89488]

Hi! Is /t/ dental or alveolar in mandarin, or does vary? Thank you.

[Glossika]

@mh89488 alveolar

[jradetzky]

great video, thanks a lot! I'm gonna move to Dalian in a few months. Is the accent there very different from Beijing?

[Glossika]

@jradetzky all of the outer northeast is pretty much the same.

[JonnyNice]

When you say dialects, do you mean Cantonese, Shanghai hua (Wu), ...

Or do you just mean accents like in your reaction to anubistiger's comment? Because I think that's kind of unfair, yes Taiwanese people typically don't speak with the retroflex sounds, but that not exactly what they would refer to as their "standard mandarin" either, I think.

[Glossika]

@JonnyNice I would say that Taiwan Mandarin is an accent. Dialects are more divergent like what you hear in Shandong and Jiangsu. I have a hard time understanding these people but we can still communicate. Wu, Min, Hakka, Yue; these are completely different languages and must be specifically learned in order to communicate at all.

[funkysirish]

best e-book to follow to learn chinese mandarin atleast 50%, so that i can learn the rest from my gf when i get back to UK

[funkysirish]

Where do i learn the basic alphabets and their pronunciations, i get confused searching for them, some say Pinyin some others say something else being a beginner itself i'm into shit loads of trouble but wanna fight it and learn it though!

Can somebody plzz help me!!!

[LearnChineseWithEase]

The differences are really hard to follow.

[sehnsucht333]

@sehnsucht333 on second thought "lisped" /s/ might be a little misleading but yeah you get the idea :)

[sehnsucht333]

@MillennialMan Pinyin x represents the alveolo-palatal fricative /ɕ/, a sound which is close to the "ch" in German "ich," /ç/. A trick for pronouncing /ç/ is to isolate the first sound in the English word "Hugh": [hju:]- the semivowel /j/ palatalizes /h/, resulting in a palatal fricative. Mandarin /ɕ/ is similar to this sound but with the tongue closer to the teeth, resulting in a slightly more "hissy" sound than the "h" in Hugh- almost a lisped [s], to think of it from the other direction.

[ellebelle9]

@MillennialMan @Glossika I have the exact same problem. Could you clear it out for us Glossika? Maybe you could make an description of how exactly to put your tongue. Every detail is a help. These sound pairs just seem to be all the same for me.

Thanks for you great work. It is appreciated en Denmark as well :)

PS. I will like to suggest that you get a microphone to get rid of the background noise.