Chinese Words on this Website
I first use machine translation to get the overall translation of a chapter, and then go back in to fix any details. Because I’m a native Chinese speaker but I cannot read much Chinese, there are many times when I’m uncertain about a translation, don’t know a meme or reference, or I don’t know how to explain a certain concept even though I understand it myself.
So, as an amateur translator, I rely extensively on footnotes to explain what’s going on. My goal is for the stories I translate to be 80-90% perfectly understandable to a non-Chinese person without reading the footnotes, and to have the footnotes fill in that gap.
But that means that oftentimes, I’ll include the original Chinese so that readers can look things up themselves, or (hopefully) someone who is more literate than me can see what the original is and suggest a better translation or explanation, or point out something I’ve missed.
To nake it easier on people who don’t know Chinese however, I’ll include the pinyin after every instance of Chinese so that you can read it more smoothly.
Although you don’t need to look up and know pinyin (or any Chinese), I do suggest keeping a few basic pronunciation rules in mind to make life easy (and for reading the characters’ names!)
Basic Pinyin Pronunciation
These are the letters/sounds that I find most non-Chinese speakers struggle with:
X is a “sh” sound
- Many people online will say it’s a “hs” sound or something else difficult; I find that this confuses people further.
- It’s just like a “sh” sound in English, but with the tip of your tongue curled and your teeth not fully clenched.
- But if you can’t figure that out, the “sh” sound is halfway there and good enough!
C is a “ts” sound
- Put your teeth together and try to blow air through the tip of your tongue.
- It’s the sound you make at the end of the word “gets” — but moved to the beginning of a word.
- I’ve also heard someone describe it as “hissing through your teeth”
Z is a “ds/dz” sound
- To be honest, making a “z” sound is good enough.
- But just for completion’s sake, I’m adding this here because this sound is the voiced counterpart to the C (“ts”) sound.
- The only difference is you want to vocalize (use your voicebox); if you think of the C sound as a hissing sound, this is more of a buzzing sound.
- Like the end of the word “ads” or “meds” — only in Chinese, this “-ds” gets put at the start of a word.
Q is a “ch” sound
- Similar to X, make it more front, with the tip of your tongue curled.
- But just “ch” is still good enough!
- The main difference between this and CH in pinyin comes with the “i” in pinyin:
- QI makes a “chee” sound, QING makes a “ching” sound, QIU is a “ch-yo” sound, QIANG is a “ch-young” sound, etc.
- CHI makes a “ch” sound — the “i” here is sometimes described like a “ruh” sound, but that heavily depends on dialect/accent; generally, I find it’s good enough just to make a “ch” sound while vocalizing (using your voice box, as opposed to just blowing air)
- there is no CHING in pinyin, no CHIU, no CHIANG, etc. These are all from other ways of writing Chinese using Latin letters (romanization).
ZH is a “j” sound
- absolutely never make it a “z” sound, i.e. pronouncing Zhang like “zang”
- the way it differs from J in pinyin is that ZH is closer to a hybrid between CH and J
- J sounds are more tip of tongue, ZH is more center of the mouth
- but J is close enough!
YU is a “yew” sound
- Think the first “u” in “university”
- If you speak French or German, the vowel sound is u/ü — YU in pinyin is always yü
- this is important because U in pinyin with other consonants can be either an “oo” sound (like in “boot”) or an “ew” sound (as in “hue”) — and I will mark the difference with ü for the “ew” sound
- I grew up with the u/ü distinction, but many people these days use a “v” to indicate the ü sound in pinyin — I find that more confusing since “v” is a consonant in other languages.
R is…
- The pronunciation of this one differs quite a bit even among Chinese speakers.
- Some people will even directly substitute an “L” sound! (My dad among them.)
- Some make a “er” sound just like in English — or closer to it than anything else. This is especially the case when it’s at the end of a word.
- And others (like me and my mom) will make a sound like a soft j in French, or like a zh when someone says they’ll “zhuzh it up”, especially at the beginning of a word.
G is a “guh” sound
- always a hard G (as in “good” or “egg”), NEVER a soft G (such as “gentle” or “edge”)