Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "渴" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 渴 in Chinese?

渴 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /kʰɤ˨˩˦/. It means “thirsty.” kuh, low and sagging, with a strong puff of air and a back unrounded vowel. Short syllable, and the aspiration is not optional.

kuh, low and sagging, with a strong puff of air and a back unrounded vowel. Short syllable, and the aspiration is not optional.

渴 /kʰɤ˨˩˦/

kě

Whether this dips or rises depends on the neighbour. It is a homophone in tone and segments with 可 kě, the word inside 可以 and 可爱, so this same syllable will turn up frequently in unrelated meanings. What identifies it is context alone, not pitch.

Listen: 渴

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Sound it out

k- The tongue body pulls away from the soft palate with a genuine gust of breath. Mandarin aspirates harder than English does, so push more air than feels comfortable.

-ě Lips completely flat, tongue pulled back and slightly raised. Closer to a grunt than to any English front vowel, and definitely not the "eh" the spelling suggests.

the dip Down into the basement of your range. The syllable is short and has no consonant ending to lean on, so the low pitch must arrive immediately.

Hear it in a sentence

我渴了，想喝水。

Wǒ kě le, xiǎng hē shuǐ.

I'm thirsty, I want some water.

Listen: 我渴了，想喝水。

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我渴了，想喝水。 opens with wǒ and kě, adjacent third tones, so wǒ rises. Then le fades. After the comma, xiǎng is followed by the level hē, so it keeps its full dip, and shuǐ dips again at the end. Three third tones in one short sentence, and only the first is converted.

Where English speakers slip

Under-aspirating gives gě. Hold a hand in front of your mouth and check for the air. The vowel routinely comes out as "keh", pulled forward into English territory when the tongue should retract. And the wǒ kě sandhi is often missed because the two syllables belong to different words and beginners look for sandhi inside words rather than across them.