LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "多" in Chinese?
dwor, held high and flat. Unaspirated d with immediate lip-rounding, then a glide from "oo" out toward "aw".
duō
Level and undisturbed. Its opposite, 少 shǎo, is a dipping tone, so the many-few pair is distinguished by pitch as well as by segments — unlike 快 and 慢, which are both falling. That asymmetry across antonym pairs is a small but genuine feature of Mandarin vocabulary.
Listen: 多
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
这里人很多。
Zhèlǐ rén hěn duō.
There are a lot of people here.
Listen: 这里人很多。
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这里人很多。 has zhè falling and lǐ dipping, then rén rising, then hěn dipping and duō level. Hěn keeps its full descent because duō does not dip, so no sandhi fires anywhere despite there being two third tones in the sentence. The utterance ends on a sustained high plateau, which learners tend to let sag.
Where English speakers slip
Aspirating the d gives tuō. The vowel is the more common casualty though: flattened to "doe", it loses the rounded start and stops sounding like this final. Start with the lips genuinely pursed. And because the syllable ends the sentence in the example above, the level tone is especially prone to tapering off — hold it and stop.