help with eng, ang and ong finals

[serendipityfox]

Can someone give the IPA for these finals:

eng, ang, ong

Also is it true that the vowel sounds will stay the same in -en, -an, -on ?

thankyou

[liuzhou]

http://www.liuzhou.co.uk/ipa.htm

[Don_Horhe]

The vowels do change slightly in quality between the pairs -an / -ang, -en / -eng, being slightly retracted/centralized with the velar nasal final. The degree to which the sounds differ, however, varies between speakers.

[renzhe]

There is some variation among native speakers (and this explains much of the discrepancy between different phonetic alphabets for Chinese).

From wikipedia, and this completely matches my experience:

-en [ən]

-eng [ɤŋ]

-an [an]

-ang [ɑŋ]

-ong [ʊŋ]

I was repeatedly corrected when pronouncing "ang" as [aŋ] and "eng" as [əŋ]. I'm surprised that some sources give these as the correct pronunciation, but it goes to show that there is variation. In particular, the "o" in "-ong" has quite a bit of variation between speakers, sometimes very open, sometimes very closed.

[serendipityfox]

Thankyou.

I must think again:

Chinese friends have corrected - 'men' of 'women' to something more like wo'mun',

Their deng sounds like dung!

[Olle Linge]

Chinese friends have corrected - 'men' of 'women' to something more like wo'mun',

們 in 我們 is typically unstressed and toneless. Syllables like that often undergo some reduction in natural speech, so don't be surprised if 們 in 我們 is pronounced slightly different from 門 in 門口 for example.

[liuzhou]

Thankyou.

I must think again:

Chinese friends have corrected - 'men' of 'women' to something more like wo'mun',

Their deng sounds like dung!

Don't make the mistake of assuming that Pinyin is pronounced like English. Just because it uses the same orthography (letters) doesn't mean they are pronounced the same. Think of French and English where some words are spelled identically but pronounced very differently.

The 'men 们' in 'women 我们' is indeed pronounced more like 'mun' than the English 'men (humans with penises)'

Similarly with 'deng'. It is pronounced like 'dung'.

Learn the pronunciation of Pinyin and stop thinking English. It should take an afternoon to get 90% of it correct, then you can spend the rest of your life perfecting it.