Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "饿" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 饿 in Chinese?

饿 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ɤ˥˩/. It means “hungry.” uh, with the tongue pulled back and the pitch dropping hard. No consonant at all — just a vowel and a steep fall.

uh, with the tongue pulled back and the pitch dropping hard. No consonant at all — just a vowel and a steep fall.

饿 /ɤ˥˩/

A single fourth tone, unchanging. Its interest lies in what it triggers: 不饿 becomes bú è because of the falling tone. And because the word is a vowel with no onset, it tends to run together with whatever precedes it, so a clear glottal separation is often needed to keep it distinct.

Listen: 饿

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Sound it out

e The bare Mandarin e: lips completely unrounded, tongue retracted and slightly raised toward the soft palate. Pronounced alone like this, it sounds close to a grunt, which is a fair description of the target.

è (falling) From the top of your range straight to the bottom. With no consonant to launch the syllable and no glide inside it, the tone is doing literally all the work — this is about as bare as a Mandarin word gets.

Hear it in a sentence

我饿了。

Wǒ è le.

I am hungry.

Listen: 我饿了。

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我饿了。 is a three-syllable sentence with a very clear shape: wǒ dips low, è drops from high to low, le trails off toneless at that low pitch. The jump between the bottom of wǒ and the top of è is the largest interval in the sentence, and getting that leap is what makes the phrase sound natural rather than mumbled.

Where English speakers slip

English speakers substitute a schwa or the vowel of "bed", both of which are too central or too front. Pull the tongue back until the sound feels like it is coming from your throat. The other issue is the onset: since English does not begin words with bare vowels comfortably, learners insert a glide or an "uh"-onset, producing something like "wuh". Start clean.