Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "医院" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 医院 in Chinese?

医院 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /i˥.ɥɛn˥˩/. It means “hospital.” yee-YWEN: a high level first syllable, then a hard-falling second built on the rounded front ü.

yee-YWEN: a high level first syllable, then a hard-falling second built on the rounded front ü.

医院 /i˥.ɥɛn˥˩/

yīyuàn

Level into falling, with no rule in play. The spelling deserves as much attention as the tone: yuan is not "ywan" with a w-glide but a rounded front vowel that opens out, and the same final appears in 元, 员 and 圆. Getting it wrong once means getting a whole family of syllables wrong.

Listen: 医院

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

yī Nothing but a tight, spread "ee" written with a y for spelling reasons, held at the top of the range with no movement.

yuàn The u here is ü: tongue high and front as for "ee" while the lips round, then opening to "eh" and closing with a front n. The pitch plunges across all that movement.

Hear it in a sentence

医院离这里远吗？

Yīyuàn lí zhèlǐ yuǎn ma?

Is the hospital far from here?

Listen: 医院离这里远吗？

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

医院离这里远吗？ contains a conversion in the middle: lǐ and yuǎn are adjacent dipping tones, so lǐ rises. Then ma fades toneless. Note that 远 yuǎn in this sentence has a dipping tone while 院 yuàn in the word itself falls — the same final with two different tones, side by side in one sentence.

Where English speakers slip

"Ywan" with a plain w-glide is the standard error for the second syllable, and it produces a vowel Mandarin does not use here. The tongue must stay forward while the lips round. The other issue is the zhèlǐ yuǎn conversion, which crosses a word boundary and is therefore exactly the kind learners overlook.