LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "可能" in Chinese?
kuh-NUNG: a low sagging first syllable with a strong puff of air, then a rising second with a back nasal ending.
kěnéng
The word sags and then lifts, and no sandhi fires — the rule requires two dipping tones in contact and néng rises. That makes 可能 a clean contrast with 可以, where the identical first syllable does convert. Same character, different behaviour, decided purely by the second half.
Listen: 可能
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
这可能有点难。
Zhè kěnéng yǒudiǎn nán.
This may be a bit difficult.
Listen: 这可能有点难。
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这可能有点难。 hides a sandhi later in the sentence: yǒu and diǎn are adjacent third tones, so yǒu rises to yóu diǎn. Kě itself keeps its dip because néng is rising. So the sentence contains three written third tones — kě, yǒu and diǎn — and only one of them converts.
Where English speakers slip
Under-aspirating the k gives gě, and the vowel routinely fronts to "keh" when it should be retracted. On the second syllable the nasal drifts forward to nén, which is not a syllable in Mandarin but passes unnoticed by an English ear. And the yǒudiǎn sandhi in the example is easy to overlook because it sits in the middle of the sentence rather than at either edge.