Sound pronunciations

For each sound, we give some tips as to how it is pronounced. These can be seen on the sound page, as pictured below.

The best way to get a feel for how something is pronounced is to simply hear it spoken. To do so, you can click on the Play sound button to hear a text-to-speech audio of how it is pronounced.

Importance of pronunciation

HanziHero is a Chinese character learning app. We teach sounds as a means towards that end, and so don’t have much built in to help you with pronunciation.

In our experience, it is not necessary to focus too much on pronunciation when you first start learning Chinese. The best way to get a feel for the sounds - and especially the tones - is simply to listen to large amounts of audio. This process of listening extensively before trying to speak at all mirrors how we learned our own mother tongues.

Most foreigners who have great pronunciation usually are the ones who watch Taiwanese or Chinese dramas extensively, or love listening to Mandarin music. Constant exposure allows you to continually subconsciously adjust your own manner of speaking to what you hear.

Further resources

If you want to get a better idea of how Mandarin is pronounced, we recommend this series of pronunciation videos by Grace Mandarin.

She goes over in depth the subtle differences between different sounds in Mandarin, complete with tongue diagrams that help you understand tongue positions for trickier sounds not found in English like qī or zhī .