Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "还" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 还 in Chinese?

还 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /xaɪ˧˥/. It means “still / yet.” hai, climbing from mid to high. A scraped h onto the wide diphthong of "eye" — and note the character has a second reading, huán.

hai, climbing from mid to high. A scraped h onto the wide diphthong of "eye" — and note the character has a second reading, huán.

还 /xaɪ˧˥/

hái

The climb is fixed, but the character is not: read huán with a rising tone it means to return something, so 还 carries two words with different pronunciations. Tone alone does not separate them here — the vowel does — which is a useful reminder that Chinese characters can hide more than one reading.

Listen: 还

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Sound it out

h- Friction at the soft palate, not the open breath of English "hi". The rasp needs to be audible or the syllable starts on a bare vowel.

-ai Wide open on "ah", closing toward "ee". The generous length gives the rising tone plenty of room to develop.

hái (rising) An unbroken ascent from mid to high, easy to hear because the diphthong lasts long enough to carry it.

Hear it in a sentence

我还没吃完。

Wǒ hái méi chī wán.

I haven't finished yet.

Listen: 我还没吃完。

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我还没吃完。 keeps wǒ at a full dip before the rising hái, then méi climbs too, chī holds high, and wán climbs a third time. Three rising tones in a five-syllable sentence, each needing its own downward reset before it can ascend. That repeated resetting is the whole technical challenge here.

Where English speakers slip

The h disappears for many learners, leaving the English word "I". Put friction at the back of the mouth. The rise is the second issue: adverbs feel unstressed to an English speaker, so the pitch stays level and the word drifts toward hāi. And in the sentence above, three consecutive second tones invite a single long plateau instead of three distinct climbs.