Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "上班" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 上班 in Chinese?

上班 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ʂɑŋ˥˩.pan˥/. It means “to go to work.” shahng-BAHN, dropping then levelling high. The first syllable ends with a back nasal, the second with a front one — a useful minimal contrast inside a single word.

shahng-BAHN, dropping then levelling high. The first syllable ends with a back nasal, the second with a front one — a useful minimal contrast inside a single word.

上班 /ʂɑŋ˥˩.pan˥/

shàngbān

Drop then plateau, with nothing to adjust. What makes this word pedagogically valuable is the nasal contrast: -ang and -an sit side by side with the same vowel, so if your two syllables rhyme, one of them is wrong. Feel where your tongue ends up on each.

Listen: 上班

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Sound it out

shàng Retroflex sh with the tongue curled back, a wide open "ah", and closure at the back of the mouth. The pitch drops steeply from high to low.

bān Unaspirated b, the same open "ah", but this time closed with the tongue tip at the ridge. The pitch jumps back to the top and stays there, so the word ends higher than it began.

Hear it in a sentence

我在办公室上班。

Wǒ zài bàngōngshì shàngbān.

I work in an office.

Listen: 我在办公室上班。

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

我在办公室上班。 stacks four falling tones — zài, bàn, shì and shàng — with only the high gōng and the final bān breaking them up. That is a demanding run for an English speaker, because our instinct is to turn repeated falls into one long descent. Each has to restart high. Wǒ at the front keeps its dip since zài is falling.

Where English speakers slip

The nasal merger is the specific danger: learners produce shàng-bāng or shàn-bān, matching the two endings when they should differ. Practise them as a pair, with a hand on your throat to feel where the resonance sits. The b also tends to get aspirated into a pān, and the retroflex sh tends to flatten into an English "sh" — three separate things to keep track of in one short word.