Chinese · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "二" in Chinese?

Q: How do you pronounce 二 in Chinese?

二 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ɑɻ˥˩/. It means “two.” Like the English word "are", said with a hard falling pitch. It is the one Mandarin syllable where an r-coloured vowel is genuinely correct.

Like the English word "are", said with a hard falling pitch. It is the one Mandarin syllable where an r-coloured vowel is genuinely correct.

二 /ɑɻ˥˩/

èr

One syllable, one tone, and no sandhi — fourth tones only change when they are 不 or 一. What is worth knowing instead is that 二 does not appear before measure words: for counted quantities Mandarin switches to 两 liǎng, so you will hear èr in counting, numbers and ordinals but rarely in front of a noun.

Listen: 二

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Sound it out

er A single unit, not a vowel plus consonant. The tongue body bunches or curls while an open central vowel is sounding, colouring the whole vowel rather than adding an r after it.

èr (falling) Pitch begins high and drops steeply and quickly to the bottom. Short and definitive, the way you would say "two!" while counting something out sharply.

Hear it in a sentence

我住在二楼。

Wǒ zhù zài èr lóu.

I live on the second floor.

Listen: 我住在二楼。

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我住在二楼。 gives you three falling tones in a row — zhù, zài, èr — before landing on the rising lóu. That run of drops is a genuinely hard rhythm for beginners, because English wants to level out repeated falls. Each one should re-start at the top rather than continuing down from where the last ended.

Where English speakers slip

The two errors here pull in opposite directions. Some learners, warned that Mandarin has no English r, suppress the r-colouring and say "ah", which is wrong for this particular syllable. Others make it a full English "err" with a level pitch, losing the fall. Aim for the vowel of "are" with a sharp downward pitch across it.