Tools/Mandarin Chinese to IPA
Mandarin Chinese to IPA converter
Convert Mandarin Chinese (Pinyin) to IPA phonetic transcription. See the IPA, hear the word, and turn it into review-ready flashcards — without leaving what you are reading.
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Mandarin Chinese in IPA
9 worked examples, each chosen for a sound the spelling hides.
hello (nǐ hǎo) — said /ni˧˥ xɑʊ˨˩˦/ after third-tone sandhi
thank you (xièxie) — x is not sh
China (Zhōngguó) — retroflex plus rising tone
teacher (lǎoshī) — the i after sh is a syllabic vowel
Beijing (Běijīng) — j is /t͡ɕ/, not English j
water (shuǐ) — the full third-tone dip
ten (shí) — rising tone
four (sì) — plain s, falling tone
friend (péngyou) — p is aspirated, not voiced
Mandarin Chinese sounds to know
The symbols that come up most often in Mandarin Chinese transcription, and what each one actually asks your mouth to do.
| Letter | Example | IPA | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| zh | 中国 | /ʈʂ/ | A retroflex affricate: the tongue tip curls back. Not the English j, and unaspirated. |
| ch | 吃 | /ʈʂʰ/ | The aspirated partner of zh. The contrast is aspiration, not voicing as in English. |
| sh | 十 | /ʂ/ | A retroflex fricative — further back than the English sh. |
| r | 人 | /ɻ/ | A retroflex approximant, closer to the s of English measure than to an English r. |
| x | 谢谢 | /ɕ/ | Alveolo-palatal, made with the tongue body high and flat. Distinct from both sh /ʂ/ and s /s/. |
| j | 北京 | /t͡ɕ/ | The unaspirated affricate matching /ɕ/. It occurs only before i and ü. |
| q | 七 | /t͡ɕʰ/ | The aspirated partner of j. English speakers usually reach for ch, which is the retroflex series instead. |
| ü, u (after j, q, x, y) | 女 | /y/ | A front rounded vowel. Pinyin writes it plain u after j, q, x and y, where no other u is possible. |
| 1st tone (ā) | 妈 | /˥/ | High and level, held steady. IPA writes tone with contour letters after the syllable. |
| 2nd tone (á) | 十 | /˧˥/ | Rising, from mid to high — not the questioning intonation of English. |
| 3rd tone (ǎ) | 水 | /˨˩˦/ | Falling then rising. Before another third tone it becomes a second tone (sandhi), which is why 你好 shifts. |
| 4th tone (à) | 四 | /˥˩/ | Sharply falling from high to low. A fifth, neutral tone is unmarked and toneless. |
How Mandarin Chinese writing maps to sound
Chinese characters encode meaning, not sound, so there is no spelling to decode at all. Pinyin fills the gap but uses Latin letters for sounds they do not have in English — q, x, zh and c are the worst offenders — and writes tone with diacritics that are dropped in most everyday text. IPA writes both the segments and the tone contour explicitly.
Which Mandarin Chinese do these transcriptions show?
Transcriptions follow Standard Mandarin (普通话 / 國語) as taught and broadcast. Southern Mandarin speakers often merge the retroflex series (zh, ch, sh) with the plain one (z, c, s) and drop the r-suffix heard in Beijing. Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese are separate languages with different sound systems entirely.
Why guess Mandarin Chinese pronunciation?
Mandarin is tonal: the same syllable carries different meanings depending on its tone, and the characters give no phonetic clue at all. Even Pinyin spellings map to IPA in non-obvious ways for the retroflex and aspirated sounds.
From Mandarin Chinese text to IPA in seconds
Select the text
Highlight Mandarin Chinese text anywhere — a PDF, a browser, a subtitle, a chat. Or paste it into the free web converter above.
Press Alt+Q
IPAtics detects the language automatically and shows the IPA in a floating overlay, right where you are reading.
Hear it, save it, study it
Play native audio, tap any symbol to learn it, save the word, and generate Anki cards — all in one place.
Frequently asked questions
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