Farsi · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "چیزی" in Farsi?

Q: How do you pronounce چیزی in Farsi?

چیزی is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /tʃiːˈziː/. It means “something.” Say "chee-ZEE," with both vowels long and clear, stress landing on the second syllable.

Say "chee-ZEE," with both vowels long and clear, stress landing on the second syllable.

چیزی /tʃiːˈziː/

chizi

Stress falls on the final -ی syllable ("-zi"), which is the indefinite marker attached to the noun چیز, so don't let the emphasis fall on the first syllable the way it might in English.

Listen: چیزی

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Sound it out

چیز "Chiz," meaning "thing" — a "ch" as in "church," a long "ee," and a "z" as in "zoo."

ی This extra ی is the indefinite suffix, pronounced "ee" and glued onto the end, turning "thing" into "a thing / something." It's the same suffix seen in کسی ("someone") and روزی ("one day").

Hear it in a sentence

چیزی برای شما دارم.

Chizi barāye shomā dāram.

I have something for you.

Listen: چیزی برای شما دارم.

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In چیزی برای شما دارم, چیزی means "something," and the sentence uses برای ("for") plus شما ("you," formal/plural) to say "I have something for you." Word order here is a good example of Persian's typical subject-object-verb pattern with the verb دارم ("I have") landing at the very end, quite different from English's subject-verb-object order.

Where English speakers slip

Learners often mispronounce the final indefinite ی as a short, weak sound, almost swallowing it — but it needs to be a clear, held "ee" since it's doing real grammatical work (turning "thing" into "something"). It's also easy to confuse چیزی with چی ("what," the short conversational form of چه), since both start with "chi-."