Characters with more than one reading, 多音字

[Guest realmayo]

I'm having trouble with 行列. Can not for the life of me remember that it is hang2, not xing4.

I can solve that! You need

and the lyics: O.K.O.K 加入我的行列......

[aristotle1990]

Don't feel bad. Many native speakers nowadays mix that one up too, for example, by pronouncing 因为 with a wéi.

I thought both pronunciations were acceptable. Native Chinese speakers, especially from the South, say yīn wéi a lot, and learners from Southeast Asian say it like this too.

Makes sense if you think about the meaning; you can translate 因为 as 原因是.

[jbradfor]

Thanks realmayo, but that would require having to listen to that video over and over again..... I'd rather mispronounce it.

Does MDBG have the tones on 片 wrong in a lot of cases? If you have a minute, please head over to MDBG and let me know what you think. In particular, they seem to mix pian1 and pian4 when referring to movies. Given how new some of these words are, I'm not sure where to turn for an "official" reading.

[Don_Horhe]

The Contemporary Standard Chinese Dictionary, quoted from nciku, says:

片 [piān]

1. 用于口语"像片儿""唱片儿""画片儿""影片"等词。

which roughly means that colloquially, in words like "像片儿""唱片儿""画片儿""影片", it's (often) pronounced piānr. I would add 照片 to that list. The official, standard pronunciation is piàn, and you wouldn't be wrong pronouncing it like that everywhere.

[jbradfor]

OK, thanks. So based on that, would you consider e.g. this entry to be wrong?

[Don_Horhe]

No, not really. It's simply a spoken variant of yùgàopiàn. I don't remember who it was who once told me that, colloquially, piàn changes into first tone if you have erhua with it, giving zhàopiàn & zhàopiānr, yǐngpiàn & yǐngpiānr, etc.

[jbradfor]

But there is no entry for yùgàopiàn.

So what I'm wondering is whether having an entry for yù​gào​piān​, without erhua and without an entry for yùgàopiàn, be wrong? Or at least incomplete? Or would you consider it acceptable for a dictionary?

[Don_Horhe]

I'd consider it incomplete, since both (all four, actually - piàn, piànr, piān and piānr) are possible. Same goes for 影片.

[renzhe]

FWIW, New Century lists only pian4 and pianr1, with the note that the second one is colloquial. I believe that the latter is a Beijingism.