LingoDrop
Chinese · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "总是" in Chinese?
dzoong-SHRR: a low sagging first syllable, then a hard-falling second with the tongue curled back and no real vowel.
zǒngshì
Dip then fall, with no rule inside the word — sandhi would need shì to dip as well. On the left edge, though, zǒng is a third tone and converts readily, and since adverbs of frequency follow subjects, the pronoun before it is very often a dipping tone too.
Listen: 总是
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
你总是迟到。
Nǐ zǒngshì chídào.
You're always late.
Listen: 你总是迟到。
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你总是迟到。 does exactly that: nǐ and zǒng are adjacent third tones, so nǐ rises. Then shì falls, chí climbs, dào falls again. The sentence therefore has a rise, a dip, a fall, a rise and a fall — five syllables with five different pitch movements, which makes it an unusually thorough tone drill.
Where English speakers slip
The second syllable becomes "she" for most learners, importing a vowel that is not there. Curl the tongue and let it buzz. On the first syllable the -ong vowel opens out to an English "ong" when the lips should stay pursed. And the nǐ zǒng sandhi is missed constantly because it crosses from a pronoun into an adverb, which is not where beginners look.