Polyphones in Mandarin Chinese

For those who want to learn Chinese characters, I think the difficult lies not in the writing part, because Chinese characters are imaginary and will be very easy to remember if you divide a certain character into parts. What really troubles the Chinese learners who learn mandarin online is the polyphone of certain characters.

The most common polyphones in Chinese for beginners are: “乐” in音乐(yīn yuè) and 快乐(kuài lè), “干” in 干净(gān jìng) and 干部(gàn bù), “似” in 似乎(sì hū) and 似的(shì de).

Once there was a foreigner who was taking Chinese for beginners, he considered Chinese people to be very arrogant after his trip to China. However, others disagreed in that Chinese people were generally famous for their modesty and humility. When asked why he thought so. He replied: “In China you can see sentences like ‘中国人民很行’, ‘中国建设很行’, ‘中国工商很行’, ‘中国农业很行’ and ‘中国很行’ everywhere in the streets, that is too pompous, don't you think so?” Actually, he has actually mistaken “银行(bank)” for “很行(very good)”. “银”resembles“很” and“行”is a polyphone，when pronounced “xíng” , it means good or okay; When pronounced “hang” in the phrase “银行”, it means bank. No wonder the foreigner misunderstood the names of the banks, polyphone is so puzzling and deceptive.

In order to learn mandarin online well, it is necessary to understand the usage of the Chinese characters with more than one pronunciation. There is no doubt polyphone is a barrier if you intend to learn Chinese well. So if you want to learn pinyin or Chinese characters, never ignore the polyphones or jokes like the one above may often happen.

Enjoy your process of learning Chinese!