Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "春天" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 春天 in Chinese?

春天 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ʈʂʰwən˥.tʰjɛn˥/. It means “spring.” chwun-TYEN, both syllables high and flat. A retroflex with a strong puff of air, then an aspirated t — a breathy word throughout.

chwun-TYEN, both syllables high and flat. A retroflex with a strong puff of air, then an aspirated t — a breathy word throughout.

春天 /ʈʂʰwən˥.tʰjɛn˥/

chūntiān

Two of them in a row — level tones with no pitch movement. Where the other season words offer nasal contrasts, this one does not — both syllables close at the front — so the whole technical demand is on aspiration and on holding the plateau steady across two beats without letting the second sag.

Listen: 春天

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

chūn The retroflex series again, this time with air: curled tip, hollow release, a genuine gust of breath — then a rounded glide into a short central vowel closed with the tongue tip at the ridge.

tiān Another strongly aspirated release, into the -ian final. Both syllables end with a front n, so unusually there is no nasal contrast here to worry about.

Hear it in a sentence

春天花都开了。

Chūntiān huā dōu kāile.

In spring the flowers bloom.

Listen: 春天花都开了。

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

春天花都开了。 gives chūn, tiān, huā, dōu and kāi — five consecutive level syllables — before le fades. That is an extraordinarily long high plateau, and English intonation, which drifts downward across any phrase, makes it genuinely hard to sustain. Resisting that decline is the entire exercise.

Where English speakers slip

Swallowing the breath on the ch gives zhūn. The rounded glide in chūn is also frequently dropped, so the syllable becomes "chen", and the retroflex flattens into an English ch. On the tone side, the five-syllable plateau in the example sentence gets turned into a gentle downhill by almost every beginner.