Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations
"No, no, no. It's spelled 'Raymond Luxury Yacht,' but it's pronounced 'Throatwobbler Mangrove.'" -- Monty Python's Flying Circus
The difficulty of learning Chinese characters is compounded by the fact that many of them are pronounced in more than one way, depending on the context. Among the 2,400 most common Chinese characters (which account for some 99 percent of the Chinese characters in most texts), one in five (20 percent) has more than one pronunciation. As bad as that is for those who need to learn to read Mandarin in Chinese characters, the situation is even worse, because the 500 most common Chinese characters, which comprise 80 percent of those used in most texts, are even more likely to have multiple readings.
Percentage of the 2,400 most common Chinese characters that have multiple pronunciations
Most of the time, the pronunciation differences involve a change in tone.
Breakdown of Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations
-
change
to tone only: 50%
example: 要 (yào, yāo) -
change
to initial only: 5%
example: 校 (xiào, jiào) -
change
to final only: 6%
example: 大 (dà, dài) -
change
to tone & initial: 11%
example: 長 (cháng, zhǎng) -
change
to tone & final: 12%
example: 沒 (méi, mò) -
change
to initial & final: 8%
example: 給 (gěi, jǐ ) -
change
to tone, initial, and final: 8%
example: 行 (xíng, háng, hàng, héng)
Data set: among the 2,400 most common Chinese characters, the 480 Chinese characters with different pronunciations
Half of the Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations change in just their tone. For example, 要 is usually pronounced yào; but other times it is pronounced yāo, as in yāoqiú (要求)
Remember that there's no specific indication in any of these characters as to which category of transformation they belong to -- or even that they have multiple pronunciations at all. These things must simply be memorized on a character-by-character basis, adding to the burden of students.
Those who would point to the difficult spelling system of English should keep in mind that this doesn't have anything to do with English. Mandarin written in Hanyu Pinyin has none of the spelling problems of English -- and none of the pronunciation ambiguities and uncertainties of Chinese characters.
