How do you pronounce "Wuxing"?

And if nobody here speaks Chinese, how do you pronounce "Wuxing"?

Personally, I pronounce it WOOX-ing. But I have no clue if that is correct or not.

Oi. I speak Mandarin, but unfortunately the best way to show you how to pronounce it also requires your knowing Pinyin.

It's sorta like oo shing. oo like in cool and shing rhyming with thing.

Also, I have no idea what the tones would be. I say it Wu3xing4 (low tone and falling tone), but that's just because I like saying it that way. I suppose you could reverse engineer the tones if you knew what it was supposed to mean in English (if anything; I can't remember if they ever say in the books).

This isn't great, but here's audio of the two syllables as I say it.
http://www.mandarintools.com/sounds/wu2.aif
http://www.mandarintools.com/sounds/xing4.aif (she's really emphasizing the ng sound; doesn't necessarily have to be that pronounced)

"Scumbags".

~J

Which dialect?

In HK it will be Cantonese, which will sound very different to western ears then the Mandarin pronunciation, though Cantonese and Mandarin speakers will probably be able to figure out what each other is saying easily enough.

Try Wu Shing or Wu Tsing which would be the old romanized way of spelling in English

Wade-Giles is quite possibly the worst way of representing Chinese sounds. Ever.

Aye, that is VERY VERY optimistic. My parents speak both cantonese and mandarin so I am familiar with both dialects. Though I mainly speak cantonese since that's what they spoke to me as a kid.
'easily enough'... heh

I grew up in a house where Tagalog and English were regularly intermixed. The worst part was when family from the PI came over and started speaking "dialects" of Tagalog which are actually separate languages.

I thought it was "woo-shing".

"Whooshing" if you want to make an ironic joke about bad pronounciations.

"You approach the whooshing facility and..."

"Why is the facility whooshing?"

"Because they own the land."

"Oh, I thought you meant there was a whooshing noise coming out of it or something."

oh god

sorry -double post-

Wu3Xing2.

I assume that Wuxing takes its meaning from the 5 elements, if so, then it is how it should be pronounced.

Xing2 isn't nearly as evil-bad-corp sounding as Xing4 though.

But xing4 sounds positively stupid to me, it sounds like the company has had 5 sex changes.

Didn't get that. However, I will take this excellent opportunity to ask my chinese masters fellows here:

how do you say "Nobody saw anything" in cantonese?

Cheers!

Max

Figures I'd post a question, and forget to look for answers.

So I gather that no matter what dialect, the English "ks" sounding X does not happen. That was my understanding, previously. Thanks for the confirmation of that, at least. I will try to restrain myself from smacking those who say "Wucksing." And thanks for the further help with pronunciation, though since I will continue to associate with people who will give me that look if I try to approximate the actual pronunciation of any non-English word, I will not actually be putting this knowledge into practice.

Thanks all!

I always thought it was "WUX-ing".

and what about "nobody saw anything"?

cheers!

Max

http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/w...rch.php?level=0

Search for "nobody", "see" and "anything", write down the Jyutping and look it up in a pronunciation guide. Grammar shouldn't have any impact.

And watch some Hong Kong movie to get the overall tone to use when speaking cantonese (such as speaking fast but making ending vowels last longer than usual), that's the most important thing.