LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "钥匙" in Chinese?
yao-shr: a hard-falling first syllable, then a weak toneless second with no vowel at all.
yàoshi
A plunge with nothing behind it. There is a reading point here too: 匙 is chí with a rising tone in other contexts, and only in this word does it reduce to a toneless shi. So the character has two pronunciations and the reduction belongs to this compound alone.
Listen: 钥匙
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
我找不到家里的钥匙。
Wǒ zhǎo bu dào jiā lǐ de yàoshi.
I can't find my house keys.
Listen: 我找不到家里的钥匙。
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我找不到家里的钥匙。 contains the toneless 不 of a potential complement: zhǎo bu dào takes neither bù nor bú but a completely pitchless bu. Before that, wǒ and zhǎo are adjacent dipping tones, so wǒ rises. Two separate reductions in one sentence, neither visible in the characters.
Where English speakers slip
The back half of the word draws the usual "shee", with a vowel that does not exist and a flattened retroflex. Curl and buzz. Restoring a rising tone to it — by analogy with the chí reading — is the other error. And in the example sentence, giving bu a full tone makes the potential construction sound like an emphatic negation instead.