How to Pronounce '黄色': Chinese Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce 黄色 in Chinese?

黄色 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /xwɑŋ˧˥.sɤ˥˩/. It means “yellow.” hwahng-SUH. The first syllable is a rounded glide into a wide "ah" with a back nasal ending, rising in pitch; the second drops.

How do you pronounce "黄色" in Chinese?

hwahng-SUH. The first syllable is a rounded glide into a wide "ah" with a back nasal ending, rising in pitch; the second drops.

黄色 /xwɑŋ˧˥.sɤ˥˩/

huángsè

Climb then drop, with no tone change involved. The rhythmic point here is length: huáng is intrinsically long because of all the movement inside it, so the compound is noticeably lopsided, with a long climbing syllable followed by a short dropping one. Do not try to even them out.

Listen: 黄色

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Sound it out

huáng Start with the scraped velar h, round the lips for a w-glide, open wide to "ah", then close at the back with ng. Four articulatory moves in one beat, all while the pitch climbs — the busiest syllable in the colour set.

sè Everything simplifies: lips flatten, tongue tip goes to the teeth for s, then pulls back for the unrounded e, and the pitch falls. The contrast in complexity between the two syllables is part of what gives the word its rhythm.

Hear it in a sentence

香蕉是黄色的。

Xiāngjiāo shì huángsè de.

Bananas are yellow.

Listen: 香蕉是黄色的。

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香蕉是黄色的。 puts xiāngjiāo in front — two syllables that both end in the back nasal ng and both sit high — so the sentence opens with a sustained high plateau. Then shì drops, huáng climbs back up, sè drops again, and the toneless de closes it. Hearing that repeated ng at the start and again in huáng is a good check on whether you are really closing at the back of the mouth.

Where English speakers slip

The commonest failure is collapsing the syllable to "hwong" or "hang", losing either the open "ah" or the w-glide. All three components need to be there. Learners also frequently substitute the front n for ng, and since the word already contains a w-glide the syllable becomes hard to recognise. Check by feeling where your tongue ends up: for ng the tip should be resting behind the bottom teeth, doing nothing.