LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "猪" in Chinese?
joo with the tongue curled back and no puff of air, held high and flat. Tightly rounded vowel.
zhū
No sandhi rule gets near this pitch, and it disturbs nothing around it — a dipping tone before it keeps a full descent. Its close relative is 住 zhù with a falling tone, so the level contour is what separates a pig from the verb to live, and both are common enough to matter.
Listen: 猪
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
农场里有很多猪。
Nóngchǎng lǐ yǒu hěn duō zhū.
There are a lot of pigs on the farm.
Listen: 农场里有很多猪。
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农场里有很多猪。 stacks three dipping tones in the middle: lǐ, yǒu and hěn. Mandarin raises all but the last, so it comes out lí yóu hěn — two rises and a dip. Then duō and zhū hold level. Three written hooks producing one spoken dip, and the run sits right in the middle of the sentence.
Where English speakers slip
The retroflex flattens into an English j, which pulls the word toward the palatal jū. Curl the tip back. Aspirating instead gives chū. And the three-in-a-row conversion in the example sentence is one of the harder ones, because it spans a location word, a verb and an adverb.