Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "白色" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 白色 in Chinese?

白色 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /paɪ˧˥.sɤ˥˩/. It means “white.” buy-SUH, but with no puff of air on the b and a rising pitch on the first syllable. It shares its shape with 百 bǎi and differs only in tone.

buy-SUH, but with no puff of air on the b and a rising pitch on the first syllable. It shares its shape with 百 bǎi and differs only in tone.

白色 /paɪ˧˥.sɤ˥˩/

báisè

Rising then falling, with no sandhi. The pairing is worth practising against 百 bǎi, which is spelled with the same letters but carries a third tone: bái climbs, bǎi sinks. Since the segments are identical, tone is doing one hundred percent of the work of distinguishing the two words.

Listen: 白色

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Sound it out

bái Unaspirated b — lips part with no breath behind them — onto the wide diphthong of "eye". The pitch climbs from mid to high across that vowel, which is long enough to make the rise very audible.

sè Thin alveolar s, then the mid back unrounded vowel, with the pitch dropping from where bái left it. Because bái ends high, sè has the full height of your range to fall through.

Hear it in a sentence

雪是白色的。

Xuě shì báisè de.

Snow is white.

Listen: 雪是白色的。

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雪是白色的。 begins with xuě, which contains the ü vowel written as u after x, and a third tone. Then shì falls, báisè rises and falls, and de trails off toneless. The sentence therefore starts low, drops, climbs, drops again — and the low xuě at the front makes the rise on bái sound bigger than it is.

Where English speakers slip

A puff of air after the lips turns this into pái, an unrelated word, and English speakers aspirate almost automatically at the start of a stressed syllable. The second problem is the rise: learners often start the tone too high and produce something level. Begin the syllable noticeably lower than you think you need to, so the climb has somewhere to go before sè takes the pitch back down.