omission of pinyin "ng"

[sladep]

Ay,

I've noticed that "ng" tends to not be pronounced. Previously, I had only heard this in 怎么样 where it sounds as though it's "zenmaya" rather than "zenmeyang", but while watching ep17 of 神雕侠侣 (Return of the Condor Heroes) recently, I first thought I heard 不可呢 but cause of the English subtitles saying "Impossible" and through checking the dictionary and entering "bkn" via Google Pinyin, I had actually realised it was "不可能" instead...

So I checked the pronunciation page on Chinesepod (http://chinesepod.com/resources/pronunciation/section/5) and they have "neng" as being pronounced in full.

Is this omission of "ng" just the normal in spoken conversation, or does it only occur in certain words, or just some dialect variant?

Cheers

[davidj]

I think what is confusing you here is that English speakers tend to pronounce ng endings as /ŋg/, i.e. they completely close both nasal and oral paths, whereas the Chinese just use /ŋ/. Native Chinese speakers teaching Chinese to English speakers tend to tell one to say it like in sing and sang, without understanding that it isn't the same sound in English.

You should be able to pronounce ng endings, in Chinese, with an indefinite nnnn sound at the end.

In terms of the Wikipedia article, it is an allophone of n before g, in English, but a pure nasalised velar in Chinese. Note that a pure Chinese g is actually an unaspirated /k/.

Edited August 23, 2008 at 07:40 PM by davidj
Removing duplicate/misplaced word.

[tooironic]

Indeed, and to add to that, you might notice a lot of Chinese syllables are the same in that they do not stress the sounds at the end of the word. e.g. liang might sound more like lianr, huan like huan, etc, etc. This is especially the case when the speakers are talking more quickly. I never thought linguistic theory would aid me in my language learning until a few weeks ago when I started reading up on all that jargon - nasalising, aspiration, etc, etc. It's fascinating to see how theorists try to annotate these sounds, and compare them with, for example, English syllables. Interesting stuff.