LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "孩子" in Chinese?
hai-dz: a rising first syllable with a scraped h, then a weak toneless second with no real vowel at all.
háizi
Rise then nothing. The 子 suffix is one of the most common neutral-tone syllables in Mandarin, appearing on dozens of nouns — 桌子, 椅子, 兔子, 叶子 — and it is always toneless and always short. Learning it once as a weightless suffix saves a great deal of trouble later.
Listen: 孩子
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
孩子在外面玩。
Háizi zài wàimiàn wán.
The child is playing outside.
Listen: 孩子在外面玩。
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
孩子在外面玩。 gives hái rising, zi fading, zài falling, wài falling, miàn falling, wán rising. Three consecutive falls in the middle are the sentence's difficulty, each needing its own reset to the top. The final rise on wán then lifts the whole thing back up at the end.
Where English speakers slip
That second syllable routinely comes out as "zee" or "zuh", both of which import vowels that are not there. Let the tongue stay at the teeth and buzz. The h in the first syllable also disappears for many learners, leaving the English word "I" — put friction at the back of the mouth so the consonant survives.