According to Google Translate the Pinyin for 这个 is 'Zhège' but the Pinyin for 个 is 'Gè'. I've looked at several links referring to tone changes (e.g. here) but nothing I can find explains the different tone given to 个.
Could anyone clarify what is happening here? Thanks.
this is common in Chinese. it is called "neutral tone". some characters(个，么，着，了，etc) , when they are used at the end of a word or sentence, will change to "neutral tone": ge, me, zhe, le, etc. they will be pronounced in a brief/short way (sounds like the short version of the first tone) . Besides 这个, there are more: 看着，知道了，什么，找不到了
Finding where "words" begin and end in Chinese is more challenging than in languages that are written with spaces, in which case we generally adopt the convention that a "word" is what is separated by spaces (major exception: Vietnamese).
While most words 词 in Chinese will be two or more characters, people often talk about individual characters 字. Oftentimes, pinyin readings are presented as a series of character readings, rather than as guides to pronounce whole words.
In order to learn to pronounce Chinese as it is spoken, it is important to pay attention to words as they are spoken. Building up the pronunciation of a word by individual character pronunciations may work sometimes, but it is easier to get a more accurate pronunciation for some word by consulting a 词典 word dictionary (as opposed to a 字典 character dictionary) or, of course, by hearing the language in actual use.
