Where can I find Chinese IPA transcriptions?

Question

Since I have some experience of using IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), I thought Standard Chinese transcriptions could be a good resource for practicing my pronunciation. Is such a resource available?

Answer 1

As you probably know, in China they use pinyin to describe the pronunciation. Dictionaries will normally always mention the pinyin for the characters.

Here you can find the link between pinyin and IPA:

• http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp052_chinese_ipa.pdf
• http://talkbank.org/pinyin/Trad_chart_IPA.php
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Mandarin

This is a website that will generate both Pinyin and IPA for a certain text: https://code.google.com/p/transcripa/wiki/Mandarin

In Chinese tones change depending on the context, but the pronunciation itself much less so. Especially if you take what is considered as Standard Chinese (what they speak on CCTV), this is not expected to happen.

In my humble option, it is best that you learn Pinyin as it will help you in the long run.

Although it is not what you are asking for this website might also be very interesting for you: http://lost-theory.org/chinese/phonetics/

For every possible pinyin you can hear the pronunciation.

Answer 2

OP, you have stated that you want to "study how the pronunciation of words change in different contexts" by reading IPA transcriptions of Chinese speech. I think this might be difficult because:

• Besides some well known Chinese-specific phenomena (e.g., 3rd tone tone-sandhi) and some pretty much universal phenomena (e.g., nasal assimilation), the pronunciation of individual words doesn't vary too much by context.
• Dialectical differences (I'm talking within Mandarin) are a lot bigger than the context-sensitive effects (e.g., You could write a book about 儿化音, but it would not generalize particularly well to southern Mandarin speech).
• If you were going to the trouble of transcribing the pronunciation of Chinese, you probably would aim for a phonemic transcription, rather than a tight phonetic one (e.g., you are a missionary or a foreign language learner). This means transcriptions will often lack exactly the things you're looking for.

Given the above difficulties, I might recommend trying to find an audio corpus of spoken Chinese. Some of the people at the wonderful blog Sinoglot have begun compiling such a corpus, with a variety of dialects and speakers; and transcribing the audio segments is part of the project: So, check out Phonemica.

Answer 3

I want to note that if you have a relatively new computer, you have Chinese pinyin in your Input Language. Perhaps you can play around with the typing?

And Taiwanese use a different system to learn, called zhuyin, which looks like this:

ㄅㄆㄇㄈㄉㄊㄋㄌㄍㄎㄏㄐㄑㄒㄓㄔㄕㄖㄗㄘㄙㄧㄨㄩ ㄚㄛㄜㄝㄞㄟㄠㄡㄢㄣㄤㄥㄦ

Finally, you may easily be able to find Chinese speakers who would like to learn English pronunciation from you. Will you be interested?