LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "马上" in Chinese?
mah-SHAHNG: a low sagging first syllable, then a hard-falling second with the tongue curled back.
mǎshàng
The word sinks and then drops from the ceiling, with no rule inside it. On the left, mǎ is a third tone and converts whenever a dipping syllable precedes it, which in practice means almost every time a pronoun comes first. Note also that 上 keeps its full falling tone here, unlike in 早上 and 晚上 where it goes toneless.
Listen: 马上
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
我马上就来。
Wǒ mǎshàng jiù lái.
I'm coming right away.
Listen: 我马上就来。
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我马上就来。 opens with wǒ and mǎ adjacent, both third tones, so wǒ rises. Then shàng and jiù both fall, and lái climbs at the end. The sentence therefore has a rise, a dip, two drops and a final ascent — and the two consecutive falls in the middle need to restart at the top rather than sliding into one another.
Where English speakers slip
Two things slip at once: the tongue flattens into an English "sh" and the back nasal drifts forward to shàn, which is a different syllable. Curl the tongue and close at the back. On the first syllable, the vowel is often too tight — the jaw should genuinely drop. And the wǒ mǎ sandhi is one more of those pronoun-plus-adverb conversions that beginners consistently skip.