LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "牛" in Chinese?
nyo, climbing from mid to high. One beat, with a hidden middle vowel between the "ee" glide and the rounded finish.
niú
Nothing bends this climb. Because the syllable ends a phrase only rarely — it is usually a subject — the rise tends to be compressed by whatever follows, but it must remain audible. A flattened niu drifts toward niū, which is not a word, so the result registers as unclear.
Listen: 牛
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
牛在吃草。
Niú zài chī cǎo.
The cow is eating grass.
Listen: 牛在吃草。
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牛在吃草。 keeps niú's climb intact, then zài plunges, chī holds level, and cǎo dips at the end. Four syllables and four different tones — a rise, a fall, a plateau and a dip — which makes this one of the tidiest complete tone drills among the short example sentences.
Where English speakers slip
The vowel flattens to "nyoo" or "no", losing the hidden middle. Say it slowly and feel the mouth pass through all three positions. The rise is the other issue: because animals are usually sentence subjects and subjects feel unstressed in English, learners let the pitch stay level.