Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "衣服" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 衣服 in Chinese?

衣服 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /i˥.fu/. It means “clothes / dress.” yee-fu: a high level first syllable, then a weak toneless second. Note that 服 loses its rising tone entirely here.

yee-fu: a high level first syllable, then a weak toneless second. Note that 服 loses its rising tone entirely here.

衣服 /i˥.fu/

yīfu

A plateau followed by a weightless tail. The neutralisation is worth noting because 服 carries a full rising tone as an independent morpheme — in 舒服 it is also toneless, but in 衣服店 and elsewhere it can surface with its tone. Whether a syllable reduces is a fact about the individual word.

Listen: 衣服

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Sound it out

yī The syllable is a single tense "ee" written with a y for spelling reasons, spread and steady, held at the top of the range.

fu Toneless: upper teeth on lower lip, then a short rounded "oo". Light and quick, sitting at the high pitch yī established rather than at any level of its own.

Hear it in a sentence

这件衣服很漂亮。

Zhè jiàn yīfu hěn piàoliang.

This dress is very pretty.

Listen: 这件衣服很漂亮。

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这件衣服很漂亮。 keeps hěn at a full dip before the falling piào, so no conversion. Then liang fades toneless. The sentence therefore has two neutral syllables — fu and liang — and both sit at the pitch left by the syllable before, which is high in the first case and low in the second.

Where English speakers slip

Restoring the rising tone to fu gives yī fú, which sounds over-articulated. Let it go slack. The level tone on yī is the other issue: with no consonant to launch it and nothing to close it, the pitch tends to drift, and it needs to be at full height from the first instant and cut cleanly.