Learn Mandarin Chinese Pronunciation

The demands of learning Chinese are now upon us. It seems that everybody today is trying to tackle this language for some reason or another. Today in the United States, Chinese has the fastest growing number of students than any other language. In fact, most people are dropping popular languages like French and German and switching to Chinese.

If you are learning how to speak Chinese, the hardest thing about it is the pronunciation--everything else about learning to speak Chinese is easier. If you have any bit of acting talent in you and know how to mimic others, you'll do fine--but it'll take practice! Actually it doesn't matter where you come from, anybody can learn how to pronounce Chinese correctly and that's why we developed these short videos to show you how to do just that.

When you look at pinyin sounds, do you ever feel like you can't tell the difference between them? For example, how about 'q' and 'ch'. Why are there two spellings for such similar sounds? And why do 'i', 'u', and 'e' have so many different pronunciations?

If you feel frustrated by this and want to get it right before you start developing bad habits, then these videos are for you. We'll take you through each and every sound and show you with our mouths how to do it exactly right.

Maybe my story is a lot like yours. I'm a foreigner who didn't learn Chinese until I was an adult, probably just like you. If you're younger, you're luckier than most people to get the head start and good for you!

When I first started learning Chinese I used to ask Chinese friends how to say certain sounds the correct way. The problem was everybody I asked gave me different answers or said I was saying it completely wrong! Part of the problem was that some of them were from different parts of China or had different languages affecting their pronunciation of Mandarin. I just wanted a straight answer and I couldn't get one. So, I decided I might as well move there and figure it out once and for all. And then I discovered China has like thousands of dialects and different ways of speaking so that kind of messes things up for a foreigner trying to learn "the right way" to speak. In the end I figured the Mandarin out and went on to figure out a few of the dialects too and that's why I made this website (don't ask how many years that took...)

I wanted to get to the bottom of this pronunciation ordeal. Was there really a correct way, a right or wrong way? The good thing was that I had a linguistics background, so I had a friend find me a linguistics book written in Chinese that listed all the sounds in Chinese by their phonetic symbols. You might not know how to read those, but if you want, you can find them for Mandarin and most the Chinese dialects on this site.

Since it takes quite a bit of work even for geeky guys like myself to figure this stuff out, how the heck is anybody else supposed to learn all these sounds that have no equivalent in English? Well, that's where I've decided to help out.

You see, I had to learn Chinese pronunciation the hard way--from squinting over funny squiggly phonetic linguistic symbols in dusty and faded books in the back of libraries all written in Chinese, in addition to trying to mimic people--well, and it worked for me 'cause I kept at it. The funny pronunciations you find in travel books and phrasebooks probably won't do you any good, but today they all have pinyin, so you gotta learn how to read it! But I don't expect you to learn all those squiggly phonetic symbols either, so I'm going to make it as easy as possible for you.

Liting (pictured) and I are featured in several videos going through each of the pinyin sounds of Chinese and you can download it all from the website right here. I know exactly the kind of things you are going through trying to get these sounds right and so I focus and spend more time on the hardest areas.

So here's what you get: