Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "喝" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 喝 in Chinese?

喝 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /xɤ˥/. It means “to drink.” huh, held high and flat, with the h scraped at the back of the mouth and the vowel pulled back and unrounded.

huh, held high and flat, with the h scraped at the back of the mouth and the vowel pulled back and unrounded.

喝 /xɤ˥/

hē

The pitch does not move, and nothing can move it. Worth contrasting directly with 和 hé, "and", which has the same segments and a rising tone: one holds high, the other climbs. Both are extremely common, so this is a contrast you will need in real time rather than in theory.

Listen: 喝

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Sound it out

h- The tongue body rises toward the soft palate and the air rasps through. Because the vowel that follows is also produced at the back, the whole syllable is made in one small area.

-ē Mandarin's e in full: lips flat, tongue retracted and slightly raised. Not "eh" and not quite "uh" — think of "uh" with the tongue further back.

hē (level) Pinned high and unmoving. With no consonant ending and no glide, there is nothing to hold the pitch in place, so it must be sustained deliberately and then cut.

Hear it in a sentence

我每天喝水。

Wǒ měi tiān hē shuǐ.

I drink water every day.

Listen: 我每天喝水。

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我每天喝水。 begins with wǒ měi, two adjacent third tones, so wǒ rises. Then tiān is level, hē is level too — two high plateaus in a row — and shuǐ dips at the end. The sentence therefore climbs, holds high for two beats, and drops to the floor, which is a very common Mandarin contour and quite unlike English sentence melody.

Where English speakers slip

The vowel comes out as "heh" or "hey" for most beginners, pulled forward toward English territory. Retract the tongue. The tone is the second issue: level tones on short open syllables tend to sag in English mouths, and a sagging hē edges toward hé. And the h itself is usually too soft — add friction so it is audibly different from an English "h".