LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "地图" in Chinese?
dee-TOO: a hard-falling first syllable with no puff of air, then a rising second with a strong one. The aspiration contrast is the technical content.
dìtú
A drop straight into a climb, giving a clean V with no sandhi. Two alveolar stops sit side by side and differ only in breath — no aspiration on the first, plenty on the second — which makes this word one of the tidiest aspiration drills in the whole list.
Listen: 地图
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
我看看地图。
Wǒ kànkan dìtú.
Let me look at the map.
Listen: 我看看地图。
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我看看地图。 contains a reduplicated verb, kànkan, where the second syllable loses its tone entirely — the same softening pattern seen in 谢谢. So the sentence runs dip, fall, nothing, fall, rise. Wǒ keeps its full descent because kàn falls rather than dips.
Where English speakers slip
The difference in breath collapses for most learners, so both syllables come out with the same amount of breath. Feel the air on your palm for tú and not for dì. On the tone side, the fall-into-rise transition gets smoothed — dì stops short of the floor, so tú has less distance to climb and the V flattens into a plateau.