"zheng" pronunciation

[stoney]

Here are a couple short clips from a show I'm listening to. The girl is upset with some guy because she just found out he is not wealthy so she is going to dump him. Could you please have a listen and tell me if you hear the "g" at the end of "zheng". I don't know if I'm just not hearing it or is she dropping it?

The Chinese below is taken from the subtitles:

浆糊证 你不是小开吗 jiang hu zheng ni bu shi xiao kai ma

我现在正式取消 wo xian zai zheng shi qu xiao

samples.mp3

[Ludens]

It´s not very pronounced, but I do here the ´g´ of ´zheng´. I can´t make out the 在 of 现在 though...

[WestTexas]

I hear it in the second one but not the first one. It's not uncommon for people to drop the 'g' at the end of a syllable if they are speaking quickly. Also, some people from southern China who do not have very standard Mandarin will routinely drop the 'g'.

[stoney]

Thanks for listening. From what you're saying, it's not completely clear. Well, that makes me feel a bit better. When I was in China, most of it spent in Hangzhou, I had a hard time hearing the "g" . I even consciously started dropping it when I was speaking. Anyways, it's always caused me some confusion.

[Wang7]

zheng = (ger) eng...the "g" is almost silent

[jiangyue]

She didn't pronounce the "g". It seems that it's a show from, maybe Hongkong?

[stoney]

The show is 单身公主相亲记. It's set in Shanghai.

[jkhsu]

BTW, a lof of Shanghainese don't pronounce the ending "g" sound. Even Jenny Zhu, (Shanghainese) native speaker co-host of Chinesepod, was corrected by John Pasden on this.

[Hofmann]

I didn't listen to anything, but there is no /g/ in "ng". In Pinyin, "ng" is a velar nasal /ŋ/.

[daofeishi]

What people are talking about is pronouncing "zheng" as "zhen", i.e. substituting an alveolar nasal for a velar nasal.

[imron]

No one mentioned there was /g/, only "g", and "zheng" clearly has a "g" at the end. For better or worse, most Chinese learners don't discuss pinyin in terms of the IPA.

[renzhe]

Many people coming from European languages tend to concentrate too much on individual sounds (especially individual letters of pinyin), instead of taking finals as complete units. This is completely natural, all of us do so in the beginning, but it can lead to problems like this one and it leads to a foreign accent in the long run through bad speaking habits.

The finals -en and -eng don't only differ in the coda -- [n] vs [ŋ], but also the medial. It's [ən] vs [ɤŋ]. The 'e' letter in pinyin represents many different sounds, so it's important to learn finals as units. Even if the coda is not audible, native Mandarin speakers can still distinguish between the finals because they still sound different enough. Because of this, native speakers also shorten finals in speech, as they are still understood.

The -an vs -ang difference is another common one. The coda is irrelevant, it's the "a" sound that will tell you the difference if you listen closely enough and are aware that it is actually supposed to be different. If you only listen to the coda and try to catch if it's [n] vs [ŋ], it will be very difficult in some cases. But if you listen to the whole final, and try to distinguish between [ən] vs [ɤŋ] or [an] vs [ɑŋ], there is almost always enough information to identify the final clearly.

[外国赤佬]

This is called 后鼻音 vs 前鼻音. No need for any fancy terms.

[poleag]

renzhe - i'm not sure chinese people are finely differentiating between the vowel sounds in an vs. ang or other pairs. the context is going to clear up any "blurriness" in what's being produced.

[renzhe]

I think that it plays a significant role, but is obviously only a part of the puzzle.

Anyway, since the point of contact between tongue and the palate is rather different with [n] and [ŋ], it is only natural that it influences the openness of preceding vowels (e.g. [ə] turning into [ɤ]).