Tag Archives: pronunciation

104 More Common Erhuayin Words in Mandarin

Written by carlgene on 17/04/2013 — 4 Comments

This is a follow-up to my previous post about 128 Common Erhuayin Words in Mandarin. 天儿 tiānr: 1. day 今天是什么天儿？What’s the day today? 2. weather 大白天儿说梦话：to talk in a delusional fashion; to speak as if one’s head is in the clouds; to sound as if one is daydreaming 影儿 yǐngr: shadow 电影儿: movie 没影儿: 1. [...]

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128 Common Erhuayin Words in Mandarin

Written by carlgene on 10/02/2013 — 7 Comments

The following is a list of 128 most common 儿化音 (erhuayin, erhua) words in Mandarin. For the uninitiated, erhuayin is when you add 儿 on the end of a word. Simple examples include 好玩儿 (hǎowánr, “fun”) and 画画儿 (huàhuàr, “to paint; to draw”). Note that I haven’t included incidences where erhuayin is added on the [...]

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Most Common 同音词 (Word-Homophones) in Mandarin

Written by carlgene on 29/11/2011 — 7 Comments

The following is a list I’ve compiled of the most common word-homophones* in Chinese. This may be useful for your general study, since there are so many homophones in Mandarin. *I say “word-homophones” deliberately, since I’m referring specifically to 同音词 (homophones made up of multi-character words), not 同音字 (“character-homophones”, when two characters have the same [...]

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Variant Pronunciations in Mandarin

Written by carlgene on 19/07/2010 — 4 Comments

I’ve been editing Mandarin entries on Wiktionary for about a year now, and one unexpected phenomenon I have come across is, for the lack of a better term, “variant pronunciations”. Mandarin as we know it has been heavily standardised over the years, and we have come to think of “readings” of Chinese characters or word [...]

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