How to Pronounce '早上好': Chinese Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce 早上好 in Chinese?

早上好 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /tsɑʊ˨˩˦.ʂɑŋ.xɑʊ˨˩˦/. It means “good morning.” dzao-shang-HOW. The middle syllable is toneless filler; the outer two both carry the low dipping tone, and crucially they do not affect each other.

How do you pronounce "早上好" in Chinese?

dzao-shang-HOW. The middle syllable is toneless filler; the outer two both carry the low dipping tone, and crucially they do not affect each other.

早上好 /tsɑʊ˨˩˦.ʂɑŋ.xɑʊ˨˩˦/

zǎoshang hǎo

You would expect sandhi here — two third-tone hooks in one phrase — but the neutral syllable shang sits between them and blocks it. Sandhi needs the two third tones to be genuinely adjacent, and they are not. So zǎo keeps its low dip, shang has no tone of its own, and hǎo dips again. Three syllables, two of them low, and no change to either.

Listen: 早上好

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Sound it out

zǎo The z is a "ds" cluster as in "beds", made with the tongue tip right at the teeth and with no voicing and no puff of air. The vowel slides from "ah" toward "oo" while the pitch sits low.

shang Retroflex sh with the tongue curled back, then an -ang that ends in the deep back nasal of "song" rather than the front n of "sun". Spoken quickly, at whatever pitch the previous syllable left behind.

hǎo Throat-scrape h into the same ah-to-oo glide as the first syllable, sinking low again. This is where the greeting lands, so it gets the clearest tone of the three.

Hear it in a sentence

早上好，今天怎么样？

Zǎoshang hǎo, jīntiān zěnmeyàng?

Good morning, how's it going?

Listen: 早上好，今天怎么样？

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

早上好，今天怎么样？ shows the phrase in its natural habitat, followed immediately by a question. Note zěnmeyàng: a third tone, a neutral syllable, then a falling one, so the low pitch of zěn is followed by a small trough and a decisive drop. The whole sentence therefore has two low anchors — zǎo and zěn — with brighter material between them.

Where English speakers slip

Learners who have just been taught third-tone sandhi tend to over-apply it and produce záoshang hǎo, converting the first syllable to a rise. That is wrong, and it happens because the eye sees two hooks and the brain fires the rule. The other error is giving shang a full high tone, borrowing from 上 shàng as an independent word; here it is unstressed, quick and pitch-less, more of a hinge than a syllable.