LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "这" in Chinese?
juh with the tongue curled back and no puff of air, dropping sharply. The vowel is a back unrounded sound, not "eh".
zhè
Spoken carefully it drops, and it regularly forces changes elsewhere: 一 in front becomes yí, 不 becomes bú. Colloquially the syllable is often heard as zhèi when fused with a following measure word, a contraction of zhè plus yī, which is worth recognising even if you do not produce it.
Listen: 这
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
这本书很有意思。
Zhè běn shū hěn yǒu yìsi.
This book is interesting.
Listen: 这本书很有意思。
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这本书很有意思。 contains a sandhi that is easy to miss: hěn yǒu are both third tones and adjacent, so hěn rises to hén. Then yìsi ends the sentence with a fall and a toneless syllable. Meanwhile zhè and běn open with a fall then a dip, so the sentence descends twice before climbing on hén.
Where English speakers slip
Two habits collide. English speakers flatten the retroflex into the j of "jet" and simultaneously replace the vowel with "eh", producing something like "jeh" — wrong on both counts. Curl the tongue back, keep the lips unrounded, and pull the vowel toward the back of your mouth. The tone tends to level out too, because demonstratives feel like unimportant grammatical words; give it the full drop.