LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "我们" in Chinese?
WOR-mun, with the first syllable low and heavy and the second weak and toneless. Not two equal beats.
wǒmen
The neutral suffix has an important consequence for sandhi. Because men sits between wǒ and whatever comes next, wǒ is never adjacent to a following third tone, so it keeps its full dip in phrases like wǒmen zǒu where plain wǒ zǒu would have forced it to rise. The plural is tonally more stable than the singular.
Listen: 我们
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
我们去海边。
Wǒmen qù hǎibiān.
We are going to the sea.
Listen: 我们去海边。
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我们去海边。 keeps wǒ fully low, then men fades, then qù falls hard, and hǎibiān gives a dip and a level high. The two third tones in the sentence — wǒ and hǎi — are separated by two syllables, so neither changes. Between them the falling qù resets the pitch to the top, which makes the dip on hǎi sound deeper than it is.
Where English speakers slip
The commonest error is equal stress, producing "wo-MEN" with a full vowel on the suffix, which sounds like two words. Compress the second syllable. Learners also frequently raise wǒ to a mid pitch, borrowing the English habit of throwing away pronouns; in Mandarin the tone must survive even when the word is fast.