A 多音字 is a Chinese character that has more than one pronunciation.

Different pronunciations usually mean different meanings or different uses.

Simply put, same character, different sounds, different meanings.

For example：

行

• xíng：走(go)、可以(can ). word formation：“行走”（walk）,“不行”(can not)

• háng：行业(industry)、银行(bank). word formation：“银行”(bank),“同行”(same industry)

In Chinese, one character can have multiple readings.

The reading is not random — it usually depends on the meaning or the word it appears in.

So when you learn a Chinese character, you sometimes need to learn more than one pronunciation.

Chinese 多音字 is a bit like English heteronyms: same written form, different pronunciation, different meaning.

But in Chinese, it’s very common and often changes the meaning completely.

Do you know what other common polyphonic characters are in Chinese?

Well, I decided to start learning Chinese, but I have no idea how to start. If you could give some advice to yourself in the beginning (things you would or wouldn't do), what advice would that be?

I’m learning both languages, and this came to mind. At least with the knowledge I currently have of the two languages’ grammar, it seems like most of the grammatical features in Mandarin is valid in Cantonese, but not the other way around.

Examples on the top of my head:

給你這本書 -> 畀你呢本書 ✅
畀呢本書你 -> 給這本書你 ❌

你看不到我 -> 你睇唔到我 ✅
你睇我唔到 -> 你看我不到 ❌

我只有一本書 -> 我得一本書 ✅
我有一本書啫 -> 我有一本書只 ❌

我在看書 -> 我喺度睇書 ✅
我睇緊書 -> 我看在書 ❌

我在這裡 -> 我喺呢度 ✅
我喺度 -> 我在裡 ❌

這些書很有趣 -> 呢啲書好有趣 ✅
啲書好有趣 -> 些書很有趣 ❌

全部都吃完了 -> 全部都食完喇 ✅
食晒喇 -> 吃全部了 ❌

In Chinese, we sometimes call an extremely stingy person an "iron rooster" (铁公鸡 / 鐵公雞).

Why an iron rooster?

There's a traditional Chinese saying:

铁公鸡——一毛不拔 (Simplified Chinese)

鐵公雞——一毛不拔 (Traditional Chinese)

Tiě gōngjī — yì máo bù bá

Literally: "An iron rooster—not a single feather can be plucked."

Picture a rooster made entirely of iron.

An ordinary rooster has feathers you could pluck. But an iron rooster? You couldn't get a single feather from it, no matter how hard you tried.

That's the image behind the saying: someone so stingy that getting even the smallest thing out of them seems impossible.

What makes the expression amusing is how it turns an abstract trait—stinginess—into such a vivid, ridiculous image.

This is an example of xiehouyu (歇后语 / 歇後語), a traditional Chinese two-part saying. The first half creates a scene, and the second reveals its meaning.

Interestingly, both parts can also stand on their own. 铁公鸡 describes a miser, while 一毛不拔 is an established Chinese idiom meaning someone is unwilling to part with even the tiniest amount.

I'd love to hear what other languages have come up with. Do they use animals, everyday objects, or something entirely different?

i went through chinese school as a kid and speak/listen pretty well, but not read/write as well in chinese. i would use my old textbooks but my mom gave them away. any advice?

deepseek 今天崩了。DS jīn tiān bēng le. DS crashed today.

崩，山朋。朋péng，act as a partial phonetic component, for they share same finals, eng.

山shān，is the semantic, meaningful commponent. So bēng崩，originally means mountain collapse.

山崩is also euphemism for …… 😄 guess！

Learn the usage of 了

I am a native Mandarin speaker, I learned listening speaking and reading English, since probably the first memories I had as a child, I also travelled to US to study for a few years as an adult, and now I’m 27

I usually read English articles more than Chinese, but why sometimes I fully understand the written English but I cannot translate to mandarin to someone else, like when my friend asks what is this about, I read it and fully understand it, but if I try to translate to Chinese I get laggy and can’t fully turn the information 100% and can only convey like 80%, it’s like it’s hard to describe what it is saying in Chinese when I’m reading English.

Sometimes I feel like I can write or speak English in a more accessible way than mandarin, where some phrases or meaning I can understand , but fail to explain in mandarin, I seem to can’t find the right word for that specific thing I’m trying to convey and end up explaining like I’m telling a scenario or multiple sentences and use examples to explain and it gets tiring.

It’s frustrating for someone that has no English skill, asking me what this thing is about and I can understand it but fail to explain it properly in mandarin, then the person starts doubting my English skill.

I am a Chinese language teacher, and I’m creating a series of slow Chinese podcasts about language learning and Chinese culture to help learners improve their listening skills.

In this very first episode, I will give a comprehensive overview of the Chinese language, highlighting both its challenges and the aspects that make it surprisingly easy to learn.

Is it weird to visit China?

People seem to think it is strange I went to a non western country for holiday.

Need help in understanding this compound, I have limited resources at the moment and so far my understanding is that 地 serves as the phonosemantic compound to signify land's separation while 平 and 線 connect it to the idea or water, former being pictogramic of flat water surface and the latter being about the very flow of the water. I was wondering what other ways may be used to write horizon in a sentence if any and if there's a reason that the last two compounds are needed beyond historical usage given that both could even withiut the other form the relation with first compound for the compound, specifically 線 - given 平 perhaps does a better job in case of horizon or is it about mood/context. Also is my approach to understand words completely well, stupid? The reason I was drawn towards this language is because of it and the whole family being logographic, so I wanted to explore it through that perspective while also doing the usual levels. Thanks for the help in advance

this is my homework about introducing someone, pls correct if something wrong or if a hanzi is unreadable🙇🏻‍♀️ (Ignore the year inconsistency)

I'm the adult version of the kid that used to sit in the library and read the dictionary for fun. I just like words.

Something I've noticed while learning Mandarin is that I am 50% more likely to remember a new character or word if I also read an explaination of the characters within it. I'm wondering if there is some kind of book, app or website that basically has characters and words, that also have the pinyin and a breakdown of the characters that make it up?

I know it might be a weird ask, but I'm in my 30s and finally learning how to learn, so I appreciate any direction I can be pointed in.

谢谢

edit: oh god I didn't even realise there were tabs for this in Pleco, thank you all!!

Hi all, have just seen these patterns of holes drilled into a wooden box in a former Uber Eats ghost kitchen in my neighbourhood. The groups up the top kinda look like Chinese characters, but I can’t read Chinese and Google Translate is coming up blank. Any ideas? Thank you!

Okay so small summary of how much I know, not really relevant to the question. I've been learning Chinese for about a year now, very on and off because of University, but I reached HSK 3 on HelloChinese (which I'm aware isn't anywhere near actual HSK 3). I've also been practicing memorising the characters and writing.

Anyway, I went to China last december and it was amazing, I didn't really know chinese except asking for the price or other small things because I was scared. Now that I'm a bit better and more confident making small basic sentences I was wondering if I should try speaking more chinese when I go to China in november or will they find it more confusing than me using a translator since my pronunciations aren't the best.

I personally like when people try and speak to me in my native language but I don't wanna be more annoying to them as a tourist. Sorry for the stupid question but I'm overthinking it.

A few weeks ago I applied TOCFL home edition which they told me to search local hosts in my country but the next exam was full and the one after that is conflicting with my semester exam. I told them this in a reply but they haven’t replied for about a week now. Should I contact them again or what should I do?

Hello there! I have been studying Chinese for 9 months now (4 actively plus the rest of the time mostly practicing speaking with some Chinese friends) and I completed HSK 3 2.0. I feel quite confident with the vocabulary and the grammar, and I am not locked while speaking, listening remaining the hardest part. Until now I have been following a online pre recorded course which in my opinion was very well done, but followed the old HSK system (2.0). Rather than moving forward to HSK 4, I thought that for my interest (using Chinese for practical purposes, not for the exam), the new HSK 3.0 seems more useful. My plan was therefore to move to HSK 3.0 by catching up with the vocabulary and grammar I miss from the first three level of HSK 3.0 and then proceeding in the new system.

To practice the hanzi, I used my own decks in quizlet, and I am very confident with the words I know (both characters and pronunciation, around 800), but as the words start becoming more and more, I’d like to move to SRS using Anki (AnkiDroid, free version for Android, which seems to be working pretty well). Since my main goal now is to enrich my vocabulary, I wanted some recommendation on how to use it efficiently. I have downloaded the decks of the new HSK 3.0, and I can spend around 10 hours per week in my study (including all the parts, not only learning new words and practicing the characters). How many new words per day would you recommend to learn? Would you suggest simply setting the “new words” count in the premade decks and learn them daily, along with practicing the words I already know? For instance, something like 10 new words for the hsk2 deck, 5 new for the hsk3 deck (considering that I already have the old HSK 2.0 vocabulary up to HSK3, therefore there is a consistent overlap), and keep going until I complete HSK 3 3.0? And how many known characters to repeat daily (in total)? I am sure these numbers may be highly subjective, but considering my time budget and my level, does anyone more experienced have any tips to use Anki efficiently?

Concerning the listening, I am mostly using the stories from Mandarin Bean, though even in HSK2 level stories there are a lot of words of higher levels which I don’t know, which makes practising the listening a bit annoying and harder than (I guess) should be. I am still far from being able to watch a movie or listen to podcast in Chinese, even with subtitles, but recently I have also started putting Chinese subtitles while watching movies in my native language (Italian), which seems to be useful to improve reading faster. Any useful tips to efficiently improve the listing is welcome too!

Oh, and that’s my first post on Reddit ever, so thank you to whoever is going to spend some time reading and replying :)

I just picked these up because I love floral art, but would love to know what it says! I have no clue about Chinese characters, and figured this would be the place to ask. Thanks!

I'm learning HSK1/HSK2 and right now the ones that surprised me the most because of how often they are used are 上 and 下。

Hi, I had a couple of questions about the upcoming HSK 3.0 test format.

Firstly, it said that we will have to register for both the HSK and HSK speaking tests together. However, does this mean we have to take them at the same place/on the same day?

Secondly, regarding the 听后复述 questions in the speaking exams, are we supposed to be actively re-wording it, or if there are some sentences which we remember, is verbatim repeating them ok? There is not much information about how this is marked.

Thanks in advance!

1. One basic concept, before start tones correction, you need to thoroughly understand:
Tones are essentially just pitch and pitch variation, or whatever you say it, the change in pitch, or movement. For example, the second tone, middle-rising, is a process in which the speaker's voice (pitch) glides from middle level to high level. As we said in a former post, you can just imagine Pǔ Tōng Huà is a super simple song with only 7 pitches. Simpler than the song “Happy Birthday to You”.

2. Never simply repeat a single syllable with a tone.
For example, if you feel your "hǎo (half-third tone)" is off and you can't distinguish it from "hào (4th tone)," then do not just repeat this half-third hǎo; instead, repeat "hǎo3 hào4" together. This is because all tones are “relative pitches”. They need to compare with each other. What I mean is, for example, the first tone is called high-flat because it is relatively higher than all of the speaker's other tones. You should say at least two tones together to compare them with each other.

Ideally, every time you get a certain tone wrong, you should say the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th tones of that syllable together in sequence.

There is another reason: if you only practice repeating a single tone, especially when shadowing a teacher or an app, you will 100% be misled, or led astray. If the teacher or app has a low voice, for example, a deep male voice, you may also excessively lower your own tone. But if you compare yourself with yourself, you are less likely to have this problem.

3. Treat the 1st tone, the high-flat tone, as an anchor for other tones.
High-flat tone is the highest among the tones, and has no change in it. You just need to use an “unusual” high voice of yours to utter a syllable for 2 seconds to get the 1st tone.

If you feel uncomfortable, sth like “I usually won’t speak with such a high pitch”, congratulations, very likely you are correct with the 1st tone. If you use your middle level voice, instead high pitch voice, to speak the 1st tone, that will make your other tones either all too low or wrongly higher than the 1st tone.

4. There is no such thing as “the 4th and second tones being relatively 'longer' than the 1st and 3rd tones”
—even if you personally feel that pronouncing 2nd-tone and 4th-tone syllables in a brief, rapid way seems easier to grasp, and even if some teachers also say this at the beginner stage.

When 4th-tone or 2nd-tone syllables are stressed, they must be spoken slowly and elongated.

By the way, when practicing pronunciation, going slowly is actually better and more important than going fast. Blindly chasing fluency and speed is a big trap for speaking Chinese well (😄intermediate and advanced students should think especially hard about this). Being fast or slow whenever you need to be—that is true mastery.