Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "喜欢" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 喜欢 in Chinese?

喜欢 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ɕi˨˩˦.xwan/. It means “to like.” SHEE-hwan, with a low dipping first syllable and a weak toneless second. The x is a thin smiling hiss, not English "sh".

SHEE-hwan, with a low dipping first syllable and a weak toneless second. The x is a thin smiling hiss, not English "sh".

喜欢 /ɕi˨˩˦.xwan/

xǐhuan

Neutralisation has stripped the tone off huan, so the word is strong-weak rather than dip-then-high. That has a useful consequence for sandhi: because huan carries no tone, xǐ is never adjacent to a following third tone, so 喜欢 protects itself from further change on the right-hand side. On the left it is still vulnerable, and that is where the action is.

Listen: 喜欢

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Sound it out

xǐ Lips spread wide, tongue blade raised toward the hard palate just behind the ridge, producing a thin high hiss — then a tense "ee" and a pitch that sinks to the bottom.

huan Written with a first tone in dictionaries but spoken toneless in this word: a scraped h, immediate lip-rounding, an open "ah", and a front n. Quick, light, and sitting at whatever pitch xǐ left behind.

Hear it in a sentence

我喜欢这个地方。

Wǒ xǐhuan zhège dìfang.

I like this place.

Listen: 我喜欢这个地方。

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我喜欢这个地方。 opens with wǒ and xǐ, two adjacent third tones, so wǒ rises: wó xǐ huan. Then zhè falls, ge is toneless, and dìfang gives a fall plus another toneless syllable. Three of the seven syllables carry no tone at all, which is why the sentence should sound uneven and flowing rather than evenly stressed.

Where English speakers slip

The x is the biggest offender: pronounced as English "sh", it collides with the retroflex sh, which is a different consonant in Mandarin's inventory. Smile, keep the tongue tip down, and aim the hiss high. Learners also restore the first tone to huan, producing xǐ huān with two strong beats, and simultaneously fail the wǒ xǐ sandhi — so this short phrase can go wrong in three separate ways at once.