哈囉大家好！ 哈啰大家好！ Hello everyone!
I’m Grace.
Today we’re going to tackle this Chinese pinyin “e”,
which can represent five different sounds.
It sounds intimidating
but don’t worry, after watching this video and practicing with me
you’ll know how to pronounce this letter correctly in different contexts
Before we get started
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To know how exactly to pronounce the sounds for this letter,
I will show you its IPA, which is its International Phonetic Alphabet,
so you can distinguish and remember its sounds more easily.
The first sound for this letter (“e”) is “ɤ” (Zhuyin: ㄜ)
It occurs when “e” shows up alone, like “鵝 é” or “餓 è”
or only with a consonant that goes before it ( _ + e ).
For example, “喝 hē” / “熱 rè”
In this case, it is pronounced as “ɤ”.
To pronounce this sound, you should raise the back of your tongue high
and towards the back
but not as high as when you pronounce the Chinese “u” sound.
Also, when you’re pronouncing “ɤ”, your lips should be unrounded.
Let’s practice it with words:
The second sound for this letter is “ɛ” (Zhuyin: ㄝ)
This letter “e” is pronounced as “ɛ”
when it comes after an “i” or “ü/yu” sound,
for example, “寫 xie” / “雪 xue (=xüe)”
To pronounce the “ɛ” sound, first, partially open your mouth,
and move the front part of your tongue a bit forward.
Also your lips should be unrounded.
Let’s practice.
The next sound this letter (e) represents is “e”
This one sounds pretty close to the last pronunciation.
When you see this combination (“ei” Zhuyin:：ㄟ)
where “i” comes after “e”, the letter “e” is pronounced as “e”.
The only difference it has compared to the previous sound “ɛ” is that
you don’t open your mouth as big.
So to pronounce “e”, open your mouth a bit
and then move the front part of your tongue a bit forward.
Let’s practice this with the “i” sound:
Now let’s practice some words:
The next sound is a very important one,
which is “ə”
when you see the following combinations: “en / eng”（Zhuyin: ㄣ / ㄥ）
The letter “e” is pronounced as “ə”.
This sound is called schwa. It’s a lazy sound.
To pronounce it, slightly open your mouth and relax it.
Your tongue should remain in the middle and central position.
Then you can make this sound.
So this (en) is pronounced as “ən”
and this (eng) is pronounced as “əŋ”
If you’d like to have more instructions on these two pronunciations,
check out this video.
Now let’s practice them with some words:
Because this sound (“ə”) is very easy and effortless to make,
a lot of function words have this sound,
since they’re usually the unstressed syllable in a sentence.
For example, 的 de / 了 le / 著 zhe
Let’s practice some sentences:
Let’s move on to the final sound for today.
When you see this combination (“er” Zhuyin:ㄦ),
often times its pronunciation is “ɚ”.
To pronounce the “er” sound, you have already learned
how to pronounce the schwa “ə”,
now you just need to curl your tongue
and let the tip of your tongue point to the place where the picture shows,
but don’t touch it. Let’s practice.
Here are some words with this sound:
Note that in China, some people pronounce “二 er4” this character as “ar4”
so you might come across different pronunciations of this character (二).
Okay, that’s all for today!
如果今天的影片對你有幫助， 如果今天的影片对你有帮助，
別忘記按讚、訂閱和分享哦！ 别忘记按赞、订阅和分享哦！
And if you want to improve your Chinese pronunciation,
I have a playlist that has all of my pronunciation training videos.
Remember to check it out!
And also if you would like to learn some daily Mandarin expressions,
check out my Instagram @gracemandarin
那我們就下次見囉！拜拜！ 那我们就下次见啰！拜拜！ I’ll see you next time! Bye!