Hi! I’m Joy — a Chinese and English teacher.
If you’re an English speaker learning Chinese, you might have run into those tricky sounds like zh, ch, sh, and r — sometimes I call it the “curled tongue” sounds because they require curling your tongue back a little.
For many learners (including my students), these sounds can feel really awkward or even impossible to pronounce properly. But here’s the good news: You don’t need to pronounce them perfectly to be understood!
Let me explain why — and it has everything to do with accents.
Just like English has British, American, Australian, and many other accents, Chinese also has many different types of accents, but just to keep things simple, we can think of them in two big categories:
- Southern Accents (spoken in southern China, Taiwan, and much of Southeast Asia)
- Northern Accents (spoken in northern China and the basis of “standard” Mandarin)
Because many Chinese communities in Singapore and Taiwan have southern roots, language resources from these places tend to follow southern pronunciation patterns.
On the other hand, resources from mainland China generally follow the northern accent, which is where Putonghua (普通话 pǔtōnghuà) — comes from.
I personally grew up in Singapore, but my family is from north China — so I can speak in both accents, and trust me, generally people understand both just fine.
So What Happens with “zh”, “ch”, and “sh”?
In southern accents, speakers often don’t pronounce the curly tongue sounds at all! Instead, they pronounce them more like z, c, and s — what I like to call the “flat tongue” sounds.
Here’s an example:
- Standard Mandarin (northern accent):
知道 (zhī dào) → pronounced zhī dào - Southern accent: → pronounced zī dào
They mean the same thing (“to know”) — just pronounced a little differently.
So, if you say zī dào instead of zhī dào, most people will still understand you. They might just think, “Oh, this person has a southern accent!” — and that’s totally okay.
Here’s a real-life example.
One of my students told me that after learning Chinese for years, she was surprised when she arrived in Taiwan — people there pronounced things differently from what she had learned. That’s because her lessons were based on standard Mandarin, while Taiwanese people often use the southern accent.
If you’re finding zh, ch, sh, r sounds in Chinese hard to pronounce — it’s okay!
Just do your best, and if it comes out more like “z,” “c,” or “s,” you’re still being understood.
If your goal is to be able to communicate, then don’t worry about it! Singaporeans have the southern accent but we’re still understood when visiting Chinese speaking countries.
And you’re doing great as long as people understand you.
But if your goal is to do well for HSKK, then yes, you’ll have to worry about it, which will be a topic for another day.
Keep learning and never give up! 🙂
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