Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "太阳" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 太阳 in Chinese?

太阳 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /tʰaɪ˥˩.jɑŋ˧˥/. It means “sun.” tai-YAHNG: a hard-falling first syllable with a strong puff of air, then a rising second with a back nasal.

tai-YAHNG: a hard-falling first syllable with a strong puff of air, then a rising second with a back nasal.

太阳 /tʰaɪ˥˩.jɑŋ˧˥/

tàiyáng

A drop followed by a climb, giving a clean V shape with no sandhi. That contour is worth practising as a unit, because a fall running straight into a rise is one of the harder transitions in Mandarin — the voice has to reach the floor and then immediately begin ascending.

Listen: 太阳

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Sound it out

tài Aspirated t with a real gust of breath, onto the wide diphthong of "eye". The pitch plunges from high to low across it.

yáng A y-glide into a broad open "ah" sealed at the back of the mouth by ng. The voice climbs from mid to high, so the word ends higher than its middle.

Hear it in a sentence

今天太阳很好。

Jīntiān tàiyáng hěn hǎo.

The sun is shining today.

Listen: 今天太阳很好。

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今天太阳很好。 ends with hěn and hǎo adjacent, both dipping, so hěn rises. Before that, jīn and tiān hold level, tài plunges, yáng climbs. So the sentence has a plateau, a V, and then a rise-plus-dip — three quite different pitch shapes in six syllables.

Where English speakers slip

Without a real puff, the t gives dài. Push the air. On the second syllable, the back nasal drifts forward to yán, which is a real and common syllable. And the V transition gets smoothed out: learners let tài stop short of the floor so that yáng has less distance to climb, which flattens the whole word.