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Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "叶子" in Chinese?
yeh-dz: a hard-falling first syllable with an open "eh", then a weak toneless second with no vowel.
yèzi
One descent, followed by a weightless tail. The e-vowel point is worth dwelling on: in 也 yě and 叶 yè the vowel is a front "eh" because a glide precedes it, whereas in 车 chē and 可 kě it is retracted. Mandarin's e is not one sound but several, decided by what comes before.
Listen: 叶子
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Hear it in a sentence
秋天叶子从树上掉下来。
Qiūtiān yèzi cóng shù shàng diào xiàlái.
In autumn the leaves fall from the tree.
Listen: 秋天叶子从树上掉下来。
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秋天叶子从树上掉下来。 gives qiū and tiān level, yè falling, zi fading, cóng rising, shù falling, shàng falling, diào falling, xià falling, lái rising. Four consecutive falls in the middle is an unusually long run and the sentence's main technical demand.
Where English speakers slip
Trouble concentrates in the second half: comes out as "zee" for most learners. Keep the tongue at the teeth and buzz. On the first, learners apply the retracted e from words like 车 and produce "yuh" — here the glide fronts it to "eh". And the long falling run in the example sentence gets levelled into a single downhill slide.