Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "了" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 了 in Chinese?

了 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /lɤ/. It means “(particle: completed action).” luh — short, unstressed, no tone. A light forward l onto a reduced vowel, tacked onto the end of whatever came before.

luh — short, unstressed, no tone. A light forward l onto a reduced vowel, tacked onto the end of whatever came before.

了 /lɤ/

A permanently neutral syllable that attaches to the end of verbs and clauses. It never carries tone and never triggers sandhi, but it does have one structural effect: by sitting between two third tones it can block them from being adjacent, so the sandhi rule does not fire across it.

Listen: 了

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Sound it out

l- Bright and forward, tongue tip on the ridge, air flowing over the sides. Avoid the hollow dark l of English "pull", which is the usual substitution.

-e Reduced almost to a schwa because the syllable is toneless. In its stressed form Mandarin's e is pulled back and up, but here it relaxes toward the centre and shortens drastically.

no pitch It has no tone target of its own and simply extends the pitch of the preceding syllable, which is why it sounds different after a fall than after a rise.

Hear it in a sentence

我吃了。

Wǒ chīle.

I have eaten.

Listen: 我吃了。

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我吃了。 is about as short as a Mandarin sentence gets, and the whole thing hangs on the contrast between the high level chī and the collapse into le. Wǒ keeps its low dip because chī is a first tone. Then chī holds high and le drops off it as a weak tail — the falling-away is what signals that the action is complete.

Where English speakers slip

The dominant error is pronouncing it "lay" or "lee", reading the e as an English vowel. It is a schwa. The second is giving it a full beat of its own, so that 我吃了 comes out as three equal syllables; in reality le is roughly half the length of the others. It should feel like a suffix rather than a word.