LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "他们" in Chinese?
TAH-mun, with a strongly aspirated first syllable held high and a weak toneless second. The whole word sits in the upper part of your range.
tāmen
Neutral-tone suffixes copy the pitch of what precedes them, and this word is the clearest demonstration of that: men is high here and low in wǒmen, purely because of the syllable in front. No sandhi is involved in either case; the suffix simply has no pitch of its own to defend.
Listen: 他们
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
他们住在附近。
Tāmen zhù zài fùjìn.
They live nearby.
Listen: 他们住在附近。
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
他们住在附近。 runs high, high, then three falling tones in a row — zhù, zài, fù — before the dipping jìn. That is a demanding sequence, because English wants to turn three consecutive falls into one continuous slide. Each must start again from the top, so the sentence should sound like a staircase rather than a ramp.
Where English speakers slip
Two things. First, under-aspiration on tā, which is the same risk as with the singular pronoun and equally common. Second, learners often let the suffix drop in pitch because a word-final unstressed syllable in English almost always falls; here it should stay up at the level tā established. If your 他们 and 我们 sound the same at the end, the suffix is not copying properly.