LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "故事" in Chinese?
goo-shr: a hard-falling first syllable with no puff of air, then a weak toneless second with no real vowel.
gùshi
A drop, then a syllable with no pitch of its own. Since gù falls to the floor, the toneless echo lands at the bottom, so the whole word sits low. Compare 认识, which has the same falling-plus-neutral shape and the same low landing — a common pattern in two-syllable nouns and verbs.
Listen: 故事
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
我喜欢听故事。
Wǒ xǐhuan tīng gùshi.
I like listening to stories.
Listen: 我喜欢听故事。
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我喜欢听故事。 opens with wǒ and xǐ adjacent, both dipping, so wǒ rises. Then huan fades, tīng holds level, gù plunges, shi fades. The sentence therefore climbs, sinks, fades, jumps to the top, drops, and fades again — a lot of movement for six syllables, with three of them carrying no tone.
Where English speakers slip
Aspirating the g gives kù. Keep the release silent. The second syllable draws the usual "she", importing a vowel that does not exist, and learners also restore a falling tone to it by analogy with 事 as an independent character. And the wǒ xǐ conversion at the start remains the most-missed event in the sentence.