@Himeaa Umm.. no ? Your explanations were very clear and easy to follow. As a person who is not Chinese and very rarely heard any Chinese in his life, I found it very very easy to follow your steps in order to correctly pronounce the names. You would do fantastic as an advisor for them and show the VAs how to correctly pronounce the words. Keep up the good work 😄
@@vorterion 🥹🥹🥹🥹😭💖 thank you for such high level of praise what!!!!! My heart is warm and fuzzy, I really appreciate your comment 🥺 I will keep trying to help out people around me 💖
Since I was a little kid I had always been very careful to pronounce things properly so this is literally the video I needed recommended to me rn been too lazy to look it up myself while still being bothered by not knowing how to properly pronounce these names
For the spelling for Jinhsi, while I thought that they could have just gone with Jinxi; they probably have thought that some english readers might easily mispronounce it as 'jeenk-see', or 'jeen-shee' so they went with Jinhsi as an easier indicator how her name sounds i guess xd Nice video of pronunciation btw~
@@suzerain_k that’s what I thought too! 😊 that’s why I wondered if it’s a stylistic choice to translate it that way, apparently HK or TW English speakers prefer to translate the X to hsi too so maybe there’s that? 🤔
i believe the “hs” follows the wades giles romanization (in comparison to pinyin)! romanization is a tricky thing, it’s interesting how they used combinations of different systems
As someone who often communicates with ESL people, who want to improve their pronunciation, at work; I like how you also use existing vocabulary to describe/reinforce pronunciations (eg: Chixia), as well as describing mouth structure when performing vocal inflections! I also approve the guideline of first exaggerating pronunciations to reinforce pronunciation habits before "getting lazy". Hopes to Kuro that they especially revisit the EN voicelines with proper pronunciation coaching, since they did work under an accelerated schedule with the story rewrite from CBT2 after all. Excellent video!
Thank you for the guide! Your reaction to Jinshi’s name is the same as mine too. It still gives me goosebumps whenever I rewatch her climbing that snow mountain to fight Jue. and she’s my favorite character too!
Pleasant 1am surprise by the algorithm, not familiar with the characters but still found it helpful. You've got a captivating presence and it was very informative. This will definitively help when reading Chinese literature or manhua. Cheers!
@@Mellwehn awww thank you for your lovely message 🥺 I’m glad I could help a little with not just the char but Chinese pronunciation in general, it’s very heartwarming to hear 😭💖💖💖
@@Osmanthus1 awww thank you for your lovely words and the encouragement! 🥰 I will try my best to help teach people new things 💖 I definitely will be making more videos, they just take awhile because I’m studying full time in University >
Honestly idk who you are but that was really informative i liked it, you are really good at this it's great also ye i like to learn how to pronounce things correctly it feels wrong to call Xiao like Zhao, it's Shao I'd say for example, or call Ky "key" like that's wrong in English. Anyways thanks for the info
@@s.slayer0124 aww thank you for your kind words! 🥰 I’m nobody really 🤣 just another stranger on the internet! I agree with the feeling wrong to call things incorrectly part, mostly for people’s names 🥺 If English speakers can freely correct each other about how their specific spelling of their name is pronounced cauz they want to be called that, names in another language shouldn’t be any different, even if it takes a little more time to learn! I just want to be able to call people by what they would like to be called 🥺 (this includes those that chose an English name after migrating and wish to be referred to as English names too, if the English name is what they wish to be called I want to respect it!)
"chick-see-ah" Some pronunciations that I've heard have been pretty bad, so I can kind of understand why they might have done what they did with Jinxi -> Jinhsi, but as someone who has some experience with Mandarin it was a confusing name to try to read.
@@MauveButterfly yeah because they translated Chixia to Chixia I was so surprised when I found out Jihnsi is actually Jinxi but I could see that they probably made an active choice to rename her rather than keep the x 🥹 hopefully their translating gets progressively better as they start to learn more about their fanbase 🥰
This was so useful! I always want to know how to pronounce things correctly in other languages, even if I don't actually learn the language, but I need to know how to accurately say it in my brain...does that make sense? Probably not, anyway, never have I ever felt happier about not being a native EN speaker since most of these sounds already exist in my native language :)) Thank you!! P.S.: It does seem like it's difficult to give a fck, huh?
@@cloud_lost_in_thought it does make sense, I get what you mean! I want to know that too with names I’m not sure about 🥹💖 And yeah it IS really difficult, not fault of the person though, everyone just doesn’t have enough energy to spare / aren’t built that way, so when I see someone caring, I want to take extra time to reciprocate the effort, energy, and time that they have spent to stop and learn 🥰🥰
@@Himeaa Oh, I definitely agree with the energy to care. When I was just starting to read books in English I would just mumble names I couldn’t pronounce even in my head 😂
The "xi" sound confuses me. Sometimes I hear it with an "sh" (the way you wrote it out "Shsss", like that) sound other times I hear it as like the letter "c" or the word "see". Even in the same video. Like you pronounced Jinhsi both with a "sh" and a "c" back to back. Also you say it both with an "ee" at the end and with more of like a "sssuh" sound at the end. Is it different for different names, or either or, or what? Like if I put "Jianxin" into google translate it pronounces it with an "sh" sound. But if I put "Chixia" it pronounces it like the letter "c". Also putting "Jinhsi" and "Jinxi" gives the "c" and "sh" sound respectively. And if it is to be pronounced as the letter "c", I then have a follow up question: What about the name "Xiao" (or "Xiaoyu") I have always heard these pronounced with an "sh" sound, never like the letter "c". Is it different when it comes at the start? And a final question: I have also heard the "zh" is pronounced as a strong "gee" as you do here, but I've also recently been told it's pronounced as a "ts" sound. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wNqDtvmzTII.html Like this video here. So which is it? Can this one be either or?
Ok, so a couple of corrections: I think I understand what you're saying now. Her name is "misspelled" technically as "Jinhsi", but it is pronounced as you would pronounce "Jinxi" correct? Also when using google translate I had it go from Chinese to English, instead of English to Chinese. Using English to Chinese it pronounces very consistently as "Jin-shee", regardless of spelling. Also if I just put the last syllable for "Chixia" "xia" I can indeed hear an "sh" sound.
@@ink4852 the true sound lies somewhere in between! If your native language doesn’t have that sound, your brain and ears will not be looking for it and will naturally find similar sounds as a substitute which is why you hear either si or shi (just like how when I learn korean, I can never tell if it’s a b or p, j or g, and so on because my ears didn’t grow up with these sounds 😆) HOWEVER!! China also has many maaaany dialects because of how massive it is, so different places will have their own accent spin onto these pronunciations based on influences from the cultures around their area, this “proper” pronunciation is just the “standardised” pronunciation that they decided after making a standard for everyone to be able to understand each other (e.g what they are now teaching in schools to children) As for Xiao, it’s the same thing where you naturally look for similar sounds, and having the xi + ao together makes it sound more similar to “sh” sound even though it’s technically still the exact same xi pronunciation (the in between of shi and si); Chinese works on syllables of sound, so they do not change at all, but when you say 2 syllables/characters together, and you speak faster and it becomes a bit “mushed” together, it starts to sound like 1 sound to non-native speakers ^-^~ As for your zh pronunciation, the “ts” Is for zi (what I called “airated” sounds”, the zh (with the ‘h’) is a hard sound similar to “gee” but without the ‘h’ it’s more “zuh” or in your reference: “ts” It’s not either or, but some Chinese dialect speakers who did not grow up with standard mandarin do not have the ‘h’ in their sound vocabulary (their vocal muscles are incapable of making the sound because they didn’t grow up with it) so when they start to learn standard mandarin for work, they tend to mix up the si/shi, zi/zhi, sounds (my mum grew up with Mongolian Chinese, she mixes up her h’s and cannot differentiate between nasal (ing) and non nasal (in) tones at all!) I hope I can be a little bit of help to you, I might have missed a few of your questions because I’m using the phone app to reply and it doesn’t let me scroll up to re-read your comment without deleting my reply 😭😭😭 so just keep replying to my comment with your new questions and I’ll try my best to help you clarify things!
@@Himeaa Ain't no way bruh! So I just typed out this long ass reply and I even posted it, but when I went to make an edit I got an error message, and now I can't find the reply anywhere! UGGGHHHH!!!! I'll try to summarize it in a bit.
@@Himeaa I made a back up of the comment in notepad this time, but it still didn't post. Would you happen to be able to see it by chance? Is it not like a word or phrase I'm using or something? Is it because I posted another link? Because I posted a link in my original post too.
@@Himeaa (This is the summary) Basically what I took from all of that is... "try your best". I was looking at a Mandarin professor and his video resonated with me so much because he actually gives English sound equivalents for the sounds. He says they are not "the same", but that these sounds are the closest you'll likely get in English. So he says the "zh" is pronounced like the second g in "George". So you kinda roll your tongue first, then the let the air out while making the sound, keeping your tongue close to the roof of your mouth. The tongue movements sounded the same as other videos I'd seen where they teach you how to move your tongue. This is the guy: "ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-LH3yhKGg3lk.html" (This and one other video was IMMENSELY helpful to me! In the other video he does the "xi" sound.) I also find it interesting your mention of dialects because I was fooling around with Character ai and I asked Baizhi how to pronounced her name. You can generate many responses just seemed to be fairly consistent on pronouncing the "zh" as a hard g. When I tell her that I was recently taught to pronounce it as a "ts" sound. She says that that is the "proper" way to pronounce it, but that certain dialects use a hard g sound. So I find it interesting your mention of dialects in the same context. Of course I'm not saying to take what the ai says as fact, it's just for fun. But I also just find it interesting you said something similar given the same context. As for "xi" I think the way you wrote it as "shsss" is the best visual representation I've seen. Like a "sh" with a snake tongue lol Edit: Ok it worked this time. Sorry for the spam!
