Hello everyone, I’m Grace!
Welcome back to my channel!
Today, I will tell you the correct mouth shapes
and tongue positions of these five Chinese sounds
i, u, ü, a, o
and also we will have some practice together. Let’s go!
I’m sure some of the vowels in this video are pretty close to the ones in your language,
but I will compare the positions of these Chinese vowels to help you easily pronounce them.
So I suggest that you go through the whole video.
Also, like you might think “o” is easy to pronounce,
but actually in Chinese “o” is not alway pronounced simply as “o”.
And you will learn that in this video as well.
OK, without further ado, let’s get into it!
The first one, “i ㄧ”. The symbol next to the pinyin is Zhuyin,
which are the phonetic symbols we use in Taiwan.
OK first, this sound, “i”, is called: high front unrounded vowel.
Here “high front” describes the tongue position and unrounded refers to the mouth shape.
So to pronounce the “i” sound, your mouth shape should be unrounded,
you need to spread wide your lips and make them tense.
So this is the mouth shape of “i”.
Then let’s take a look at the tongue position, it should be high and up front.
So first, put the tip of your tongue down behind your bottom front teeth,
and then raise the front part of your tongue toward the roof of your mouth,
so you put your tongue in a high forward position in your mouth.
OK, then you can easily pronounce the “i” sound. i i
Let’s practice: i i i
OK, next, “u ㄨ”
This sound is called: high back rounded vowel.
So the mouth shape is rounded,
when you pronounce “u”, you should round your lips.
And the tongue position is high and in the back,
so you need to pull back your tongue and raise the back of your tongue close to the roof of your mouth.
OK, so rounded lips plus a tongue that is high and in the back of the mouth: u u
Let’s practice: u u u
The third one is “ü”.
This one is not as common as the last two sounds in other languages.
So I know some of the students are struggling with this sound,
but I’m sure after I tell you the details of this sound,
you will find out that this is not as hard as you thought.
OK, this sound “ü” is called: high front rounded vowel.
It’s quite similar to the “i” sound, isn’t it?
The technical term for “i” is high front unrounded vowel,
and for “ü” is “high front rounded vowel”.
So the only difference between them is the mouth shape,
their tongue positions are exactly the same.
So to pronounce “ü” sound, you need to round your lips,
and then put the tip of your tongue down behind your bottom front teeth,
and raise the front part of your tongue toward the roof of your mouth,
just exactly like what you did with the “i” sound,
but remember, to pronounce “ü” sound, you need to make your lips a small circle.
OK, let’s practice: ü ü ü
Next one, “a ㄚ”. This sound is called: low central unrounded vowel.
Because its tongue position is low, you need to open your mouth bigger
and put your tongue low in your mouth, like this a a.
OK, let’s practice: a a a
The last one, “o ㄛ”.
Although you might think this sound is easy,
when “o” comes after consonants “b p m f” alone, it sounds a bit different.
I will explain this to you later.
First, let’s see how to pronounce the “o” sound,
This sound is called: high-mid back rounded vowel.
Its tongue position is pretty close to the “u” sound, but it is lower than that in “u”.
So to pronounce the o sound, you have to put your lips in a round shape,
And also pull back your tongue and raise the back of your tongue, but not as high as the position of “u”.
OK, let’s practice: o o o.
As I mentioned, when the “o” comes after consonants “b p m f” alone,
it sounds a bit different, it sounds like “uo”. For instance, “潑水”,
although the Pinyin and Zhuyin make it seem like you have to pronounce it as “po 水”,
actually not, you should pronounce it like there is a “u” in the middle, like this “潑水”
Let’s see another example: this word is pronounced “模仿”.
OK, after knowing how to pronounce i / u / ü / a / o,
let’s practice them with words:
OK, that's it for today!
If you found this lesson useful,
please give it a thumbs-up.
And also if you want to improve your Chinese pronunciation more,
I have a playlist with many pronunciation lessons,
and I talked about a lot of details there,
so if you haven’t seen them,
I will put them here and in my description.
You can go to check them out!
Alright, I’ll see you next time, bye!