bozisuk said

Chinese Pronunciation

As I was drinking my sample of “Ye Zhu Tang” Wild Arbor Raw Pu-erh from LP today, a question came to the front of my mind that has come up repeatedly before: how exactly do you pronounce Chinese tea names? I would really like to be able to pronounce (at least somewhat accurately) the tea that I am drinking in its native language. Being somewhat ignorant of Chinese culture and language, however, I do not know where to begin with this endeavor. I understand that what we read is an English spelling of the original Chinese, but I am under the impression (perhaps mistakenly) that there are multiple ways to spell Chinese in English. Does anyone know what system is typically used? Has anyone else learned how to pronounce the names and/or do you know of resources to pronounce them?

Peace

12 Replies

Bitterleaf said

If you can learn the basics of “pinyin”, then you’ll be a lot closer. Unfortunately a lot of phonetic translations don’t include the exact pronunciation, but it’s pretty close. Pinyin is the standard method of using roman characters to represent Chinese sounds, but they’re not pronounced according to the same rules.

Sorry, I don’t have any online resources offhand for learning pinyin, although I’m sure there are plenty out there. If you can find a video or something that has audio playback of a native speaker repeating the pronunciations properly, you’ll get it a lot better.

Once you understand pinyin, you’ll know that “ye” sounds kind of like “yea”, “zhu” sounds like “jew” and “tang” sounds more like “tahng”. Probably not what most people would expect, but “zh” sounds more like a “j” or soft “g”, and anything with an “ang” ending has a long vowel sound. With some vocabulary down as well you can see that some common writing (“chi tse beeng”) is not actually proper pinyin, but closer to how English speakers might be able to pronounce it.

What you won’t see on cake wrappers or internet listing is the tone of the word (inflection). It’ll either one of 4 – flat, rising, falling, or falling rising. It’s vital to learn if you pursue learning Chinese further, but not too necessary for getting the basic pronunciation of wrappers or tea names.

bozisuk said

Sounds like a great starting place! Thanks

Tea In Spoons said

Another note is that most teas (at least I’ve seen) are generally in mandarin which a dialect of Chinese. Please correct if I’m wrong.

aardvarkcheeselog said

1) go to babelcarp (http://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/).

2) type or paste your Romanized Chinese tea term and hit enter.

3) from the results page, copy the Chinese characters.

4) go to Google translate and choose Chinese or Detect Language.

5) paste your characters from step 3 into the input edit.

6) click the little audio speaker icon to hear it pronounced.

curlygc said

OMG, this is the best thing ever. I mean, even if it isn’t perfect, I am really getting a sense of just how badly I’ve been butchering the Chinese language all this time!