Cantonese pronunciation and Jyutping: practice tones you can hear

Cantonese is tonal. One syllable with the wrong contour can change meaning entirely. Jyutping plus audio turns guessing into something you can see and repeat.

What Jyutping gives you

Jyutping romanizes Cantonese sounds and marks tone numbers (e.g. nei5 hou2). It helps heritage speakers, partners, and beginners say lines out loud even before they read every character fluently.

How to read Jyutping

Each syllable is written in roman letters, with a tone number (1–6) at the end. Spaces mark syllable breaks, not word breaks in the English sense.

In nei5 hou2 (你好), nei5 is the syllable nei on tone 5 and hou2 is hou on tone 2. Swap the number and you change the word: ma1, ma3, and ma5 are three different meanings (mother, hemp, horse).

On CantoAI, that final digit matches the coloured tone graph beside each syllable:

1 High flat
2 High rise
3 Mid flat
4 Low fall
5 Low rise
6 Low flat

Read the Jyutping, listen to the audio (slow it down if you need to), check the graph, then say the syllable out loud until the pitch shape feels natural.

Why tone graphs matter

Seeing the pitch shape for each syllable makes tone pairs less abstract. You can compare your speech to the contour, slow audio down, and relisten until the shape clicks.

Example from Pronounce: 好耐冇見 (long time no see)

好 hou2 耐 noi6 冇 mou5 見 gin3

Each syllable shows the character, Jyutping with tone number, and a pitch contour you can match out loud.

Pronounce mode on CantoAI

In Pronounce mode on CantoAI, paste or type a phrase. Each syllable shows:

Chat and Translate also include Jyutping and audio on every reply, so pronunciation practice is not limited to one mode.

Hear the tones before the real conversation. Free to start.

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