- First there is "zh" which should be spoken roughly like the hard J at the beginning of "jungle". Technically this is a "retroflex initial", and if you really want to get it right, you have to curl your tongue back like a pirate saying "Aaaar!", touching the roof of your mouth, to say the sound. Watch this clip for more.
- The ONG in "zhōng" is not pronounced like the ONG in "wrong", at the back of the mouth, but further forward and "longer" so that it's more like "oong".
- The second syllable "guó" is not pronounced "gwoe". It is closer to "gwo" with the O pronounced like that at the beginning of "oscillate".
- The R at the beginning of rén is a sound that just doesn't have any equivalent in English. The way English-speakers say the R in the French word "frère" when singing "Frère Jacques" is close. It absolutely should not be trilled or rolled at all.
- Finally, there is the matter of the tones. Zhōngguórén should be spoken with the first syllable vowel-sound in First Tone (pitched up and "held" slightly long, and the other syllable vowel-sounds in Second Tone (rising in pitch as if asking a question - Australians should find that one easy). Note the diacritic marks over the vowels which show the tone that should be used. In systems where diacritics are not supported, numbers are used, and it would be Zhong1guo2ren2.
Having typed all that TL:DR, I recommend anyone who wants a very good guide to Chinese pronunciation to drop the characters into Google Translate. The translations are sometimes very dodgy, but if you look under the "From language" window, you'll see a small "speaker" icon. If you click on that, the words will be read aloud, usually by a woman. Here is
中国人 as an example.
Bing Translate works the same way, and its reader is usually male. The
MDBG dictionary also offers pronunciation, but it "isolates" each character/syllable in words in a way that does not sound natural and can be inaccurate (sometimes the tone of a syllable in a word can modify the tone of the preceding syllable. 你好 or "Hello" is an example; both syllables, nǐ and hǎo, are Third Tone, but in actual speech
nǐhǎo becomes
níhǎo because saying two successive Third Tone syllables is awkward).
澳大利亚 has to be phonetic, right? Any puns embedded in it? Like Salvador 大利 ?
Yes, 澳大利亚 is purely phonetic. Generally speaking, "older" countries, or at least those with which China had earlier dealings*, have names in the form <something>国 or <something>land. The UK is 英国 or Yīngguó or basically England. The USA is 美国 or Měiguó or A
-me-rica
land. France is Fǎguó, Germany is Déguó and so on. "Newer" countries are handled phonetically; Kenya is Kěnníyà, Iraq is Yīlākè (The Yi is pronounced like the French Y in Ypres), Mexico is Mòxīgē (remember that xi is pronounced "shi" and ge is pronounced "guh"). Sometimes we partially translate the name; New Zealand is 新西兰 or Xīnxīlán, and while xīlán is a phonetic representation of "Zealand", Xīn is simply the Chinese word for "new".
Wherever possible, in phonetic representations of the names of foreign places and people, we Chinese choose characters with appropriate, and generally complimentary, meanings from our many homophones. Yīngguó literally means "distinguished country", Měiguó means "beautiful country", Déguó is "virtuous country" and so on (I will not comment on the accuracy of these meanings
). 澳大利亚 (Àodàlìyà) can be read literally as "next to great beneficial bay/harbour". Sometimes, however, the phonetic representation is purely pragmatic and has no hidden meaning (肯尼亚 Kěnníyà, for example, is made up of characters meaning "consent", "Buddhist nun", and "next to").
*I'm speaking here of countries outside China's ancient local geo-cultural region which have odder names. India is Yìndù (Hindu), Japan is Rìběn (literally "sun origin" because it is East of China - "land of the rising sun"), Korea is
Hánguó (especially the ROK (BTW the "Hán" in the name is not the same word as the Chinese Han Dynasty or the Han people)) or
Cháoxiǎn (drawn from the last royal dynasty of Korea, the Joseon (1392-1897), but, oddly, applied especially to the DPRK), and Vietnam is
Yuènán, meaning roughly "Southern place", because what is now northern Vietnam was once the southernmost province of China.
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