LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "好吃" in Chinese?
how-CHRR: a low sagging first syllable with a scraped h, then a retroflex second held high and flat with a puff of air.
hǎochī
Dip then plateau, with no sandhi inside the word, since chī is level. But 好 is a third tone, so anything dipping in front of it converts — and the adverb hěn, which introduces almost every adjective in Mandarin, is exactly that. The change happens at the word's left edge rather than inside it.
Listen: 好吃
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
这个菜很好吃。
Zhège cài hěn hǎochī.
This dish is delicious.
Listen: 这个菜很好吃。
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这个菜很好吃。 shows precisely that: hěn and hǎo are adjacent third tones, so hěn rises to hén. Then chī jumps to a high level tone, so the sentence ends by climbing steadily — dip, rise, high. Learners who produce two dips here make the ending sound laboured, which is a shame in a compliment about food.
Where English speakers slip
The second syllable comes out as "chee" for almost everyone, importing a vowel that does not exist and flattening the retroflex into the ch of "cheese". Curl the tongue back until the sound goes hollow. Then there is the hěn hǎo sandhi, which is missed constantly because hěn is such a routine word that learners stop looking at what follows it.