Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "你们" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 你们 in Chinese?

你们 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ni˨˩˦.mən/. It means “you (plural).” NEE-mun, with a low sagging first syllable and a weak toneless second. The stress pattern is heavy-light, not two equal beats.

NEE-mun, with a low sagging first syllable and a weak toneless second. The stress pattern is heavy-light, not two equal beats.

你们 /ni˨˩˦.mən/

nǐmen

The suffix has no tone, which has a useful side effect: it insulates nǐ from any third tone that follows. In nǐmen hǎo, for instance, nǐ and hǎo are not adjacent, so nǐ keeps its full dip — quite different from plain nǐ hǎo, where the sandhi fires and nǐ rises. The plural form and the singular form of the greeting genuinely sound different.

Listen: 你们

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Sound it out

nǐ A plain n onto a tense spread "ee", with the pitch dropping to the bottom of your range. This syllable carries all the tonal information in the word.

men The plural suffix, toneless and quick: a short central vowel between two nasals, with the tongue tip touching the ridge for the final n. It should be noticeably shorter than the syllable before it.

Hear it in a sentence

你们是学生吗？

Nǐmen shì xuésheng ma?

Are you students?

Listen: 你们是学生吗？

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你们是学生吗？ ends with the toneless ma, so the sentence has weak syllables at both the second position and the last. In between, shì falls hard and xuésheng gives a rise and another toneless syllable. Three of the six syllables carry no tone at all, which is why the sentence should sound uneven rather than marched out.

Where English speakers slip

The dominant error is giving men a full vowel and equal length, so the word comes out as "nee-MEN" with the stress on the wrong half. Mandarin puts the weight on nǐ and lets men fade. Learners also frequently raise nǐ to a mid or high pitch under the influence of English pronoun de-stressing, which loses the third tone that is doing all the work.