0.7 Sounds English Does Not Have (Vowels) — Epoché
What you will be able to do Produce the vowel written ü and keep it apart from u, so that 努 nǔ and 女 nǚ are two words and not one. Read the finals e, ian, ong and er as Mandarin spells them rather than as English would, and say what each one actually sounds like. Explain why 去 is written qù with a plain u although the vowel is ü, and predict where the two dots are written and where they are left off. Turn a final into a whole syllable with the y and w spellings, and use the apostrophe to show where one syllable ends and the next begins. Prerequisites : lesson 0.6, which you can open again here: 0.6 Sounds and Tones . The consonant series from that lesson decide how some of these vowels are spelled, so the two lessons lock together. A final is everything in a syllable from the first vowel onwards, and Mandarin has about thirty-five of them. Most give an English speaker no trouble: ai is the vowel of eye , ao is the vowel of how , ou is the vowel of go . This lesson is about the handful that do give trouble, and they divide into two kinds. One is a vowel your mouth has never made. The others are vowels your mouth can make easily but that pinyin spells in a way your eye will misread, so you go on saying the wrong thing while believing you are reading correctly. That second kind is the more dangerous, because nothing warns you. A learner who has never been told about the final ian will read 天 tiān with the a of father for years, and every Mandarin speaker will understand from context and never correct it. Ten minutes here saves that. The vowel that is not in English Say the English word see and hold the vowel. Your tongue is high and forward and your lips are spread. Keep the tongue exactly where it is, do not let it move at all, and round your lips as though you were about to say ooh . The sound that comes out is ü. It is the French u of tu and the German ü of über , and English has nothing like it, which is why almost every English speaker replaces it with u on the first attempt. The test of whether you have it is the tongue, not the lips. If the sound turns into the oo of food , your tongue slid backwards along with the lips. Put a finger lightly on your chin, say see , round the lips, and feel that nothing else moved. Practise it silently first if that helps, holding the ee shape and rounding, and only then let the voice in. The sounds in a table Here are four pairs in which u and ü are the only difference. Each pair is two real words with two different characters, so this is the same kind of test as the twenty consonant pairs in the previous lesson. Read each row across, then cover the second column and try to produce both members from memory. With u With ü The two meanings 努 nǔ 女 nǚ to make an effort / female, woman 路 lù 绿 lǜ road / green 炉 lú 驴 lǘ stove / donkey 鲁 lǔ 吕 lǚ dull-witted, crude; an old state name / a family name Notice that every row begins with n or l. That is not an accident and it is the key to the spelling rule below: n and l are the only initials in Mandarin that take both u and ü, so they are the only place where the two dots have to be written to keep the words apart. Four finals that mislead the eye Each of the next four is spelled with a letter that means something else in English. Read the middle column out loud and then the example, and let the example be the thing you remember. Written What it actually sounds like Example e alone The vowel of English duh , pulled a little back in the mouth. Not the e of bet . 呃 è, 热 rè, 喝 hē ian Close to English yen . The a is squeezed almost out of existence by the i in front and the n behind. 天 tiān, 年 nián, 先 xiān ong Nearer the oo of book than the o of song , closed off with ng. 中 zhōng, 红 hóng, 东 dōng er A single vowel said with the tongue curled up, like the American er of her with no r consonant after it. 儿 ér, 二 èr The e in the first row is only that sound when it stands alone in the final. In ie, üe and ei the letter e is much closer to the English e of bet , so 谢 xiè and 月 yuè do not contain the vowel of duh at all. One letter, two jobs, decided by what stands next to it. The ian row has a partner worth learning at the same time. In iang the a is a full open a, so 先 xiān and 想 xiǎng have genuinely different vowels: the first is near yen , the second near yang . If you read both with the same a you lose the pair, and the two finals are common enough that you will lose it often. The er row does double duty. On its own it is the syllable of 二 èr, two. Attached to the end of another syllable it is a suffix that curls the whole ending, written r in pinyin: 哪儿 nǎr, where, and 点儿 diǎnr, a little. This is a northern habit that the standard language has kept in a limited set of words, and you will meet it in real sentences long before you need to produce it. When u means ü, and when i and u begin a syllable Pinyin was designed to be easy to type and to print, and two of its rules exist for that reason alone. Neither rule changes a sound. Both change what you see, which is why they belong in a lesson about reading vowels. The first rule concerns the two dots. When u comes straight after j, q or x, or after the y of the yu spelling, it is always ü, because a plain u never follows them, so there is nothing to confuse it with and the dots are left off. That is why 去 is written qù and pronounced with ü, and why 学 is xué rather than xüé. After n and l both vowels occur, so there the dots are written, which is exactly what the table above shows. After every other initial the vowel is always plain u and the question never arises. The second rule concerns syllables that have no initial at all. A final beginning with i, u or ü can stand as a whole syllable, and when it does, pinyin gives the syllable a visible edge. When another vowel follows the i or u, the i is rewritten as y and the u as w: ie becomes ye, uo becomes wo, and the full forms iou and uei, which pinyin shortens to iu and ui after an initial, become you and wei. When i or