Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "看" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 看 in Chinese?

看 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /kʰan˥˩/. It means “to see / to watch.” kahn with a strong puff of air and a hard falling pitch. Open vowel, front n, and aspiration that must be audible.

kahn with a strong puff of air and a hard falling pitch. Open vowel, front n, and aspiration that must be audible.

看 /kʰan˥˩/

kàn

Stable in itself, disruptive to others: 不看 becomes bú kàn. In the frequent verb-compound kàn bu jiàn, the 不 in the middle loses its tone entirely, so the phrase runs falling, nothing, falling — a useful pattern to recognise since these potential constructions are everywhere.

Listen: 看

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

k- The back of the tongue releases from the soft palate followed by a genuine gust of breath. Mandarin's k is more strongly aspirated than the English k in "key", so err on the side of too much air.

-an An open, jaw-down "ah" as in "father", closed with the tongue tip at the ridge. Not the flat vowel of "can" — the mouth should be noticeably more open.

kàn (falling) High to low, fast and decisive. The open vowel gives the fall room, so there is no excuse for a half-hearted descent here.

Hear it in a sentence

我明天去看你。

Wǒ míngtiān qù kàn nǐ.

I'll go see you tomorrow.

Listen: 我明天去看你。

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

我明天去看你。 stacks kàn between the falling qù and the dipping nǐ, giving two consecutive falls before the sentence sinks. Wǒ at the start keeps its dip because míng is a second tone. So the pitch goes low, up, high, down, down, low — a full tour of the tone system in six syllables.

Where English speakers slip

Under-aspiration turns kàn into gàn, a different and considerably less polite word in some contexts, so the puff of air genuinely matters here. The other habitual slip is the nasal: letting the ending drift to ng gives kàng, and because English speakers do not distinguish the two nasals before a pause, the drift usually goes unnoticed until someone points it out.