How to Pronounce '起床': Chinese Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce 起床 in Chinese?

起床 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /tɕʰi˨˩˦.ʈʂʰwɑŋ˧˥/. It means “to get up / to get out of bed.” chee-CHWAHNG: a low dipping first syllable with a palatal initial, then a rising second with a retroflex one. Two different aspirated affricates back to back.

How do you pronounce "起床" in Chinese?

chee-CHWAHNG: a low dipping first syllable with a palatal initial, then a rising second with a retroflex one. Two different aspirated affricates back to back.

起床 /tɕʰi˨˩˦.ʈʂʰwɑŋ˧˥/

qǐchuáng

Dip then climb, and no sandhi fires — the rule fires only when two third tones meet. So qǐ keeps its full dip and chuáng keeps its rise, and the word has a clear low-to-high shape across its two syllables. That upward trajectory is worth exaggerating while learning it.

Listen: 起床

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Sound it out

qǐ Blade of the tongue against the hard palate, lips spread, released with a strong puff of air, onto a tense "ee". The pitch sinks to the bottom of the range.

chuáng Now the tongue curls back for a retroflex release, also aspirated, into a rounded glide and a wide open "ah" closed at the back by ng. The pitch climbs from mid to high, so the word ends much higher than it began.

Hear it in a sentence

我每天七点起床。

Wǒ měi tiān qī diǎn qǐchuáng.

I get up at seven every day.

Listen: 我每天七点起床。

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我每天七点起床。 contains a sandhi at the start: wǒ and měi are adjacent third tones, so wǒ rises. Then tiān and qī are both level, diǎn dips, qǐ dips again — and crucially diǎn and qǐ are adjacent third tones too, so diǎn rises. Two separate sandhi events in one seven-syllable sentence, and neither is marked in the pinyin.

Where English speakers slip

The two initials collapse into one: learners produce the same English "ch" for both q and ch, when one is made forward against the hard palate with spread lips and the other with the tongue curled back. Say them as a contrasting pair. On the tone side, the diǎn qǐ sandhi in the example sentence is one that beginners almost always miss, because the two syllables belong to different words and the connection is easy to overlook.