LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "马" in Chinese?
mah, low and sagging. Ordinary m and a broad open vowel — simple to articulate, and the tone is the whole difficulty.
mǎ
The classic tone-drill syllable: mā, má, mǎ and mà are all real words, and this is the third of them. Whether it dips or rises depends entirely on what follows, and since horses are usually the subject of a sentence, the verb after it decides.
Listen: 马
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
马跑得很快。
Mǎ pǎo de hěn kuài.
The horse runs fast.
Listen: 马跑得很快。
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马跑得很快。 has mǎ and pǎo adjacent, both dipping, so mǎ rises: má pǎo. Then de fades, hěn keeps its dip because kuài falls, and kuài plunges. Three written dipping tones and only two spoken as dips — with the conversion happening right at the start where it is easiest to miss.
Where English speakers slip
Because this syllable is the standard textbook example of the four tones, learners over-rehearse the isolated citation form — a full dip with a lift at the end — and then produce it inside sentences where only the low portion belongs. In connected speech the dip usually just stays low. And the mǎ pǎo conversion is skipped by nearly everyone at first.