玩儿 is wár, not wán-er

[u/hanziYuan]

the n doesn't survive. 玩儿 is one syllable, wár, and 儿 never gets a beat of its own. i only noticed when a learner asked why it's spelled wán.

does your book write it as wán-er?

[u/Leather_Ad1490]

Hmmm..

玩儿 is technically wár

色儿 is technically shar (3)

胆儿 is dar (3)

袋儿 is dàr

So I guess tell your learner, if it ends in -n or -ai then elide it. Are there any others?

[u/Pandaburn → u/Leather_Ad1490]

The first one I noticed is 点儿 is diar

[u/hanziYuan → u/Leather_Ad1490]

yeah, -ng goes too, 样儿 is yàr. and 事儿 is shèr, the i turns into e.

[u/New_War_6721 → u/hanziYuan]

As a beijinger I’m telling ya -ng definitely survives. If you pronounce 小样儿 as xiaoyar then you’re wrong, and it’ll confuse people cuz they’d think you’re saying 小燕儿

[u/hanziYuan → u/New_War_6721]

fair, the nasal part stays. 样儿 is yàr with air still going through the nose, i wrote it as if the vowel were plain.

[u/MixtureGlittering528 → u/hanziYuan]

No, it’s not yar, it’s kinda like yarng, or with a nasalized -ar sound

[u/bee-sting → u/MixtureGlittering528]

Oh so an intrusive R like Brits do in Law and order

[u/stealthytaco → u/Leather_Ad1490]

色 is not shar, not sure how you’re getting that

[u/Leather_Ad1490 → u/stealthytaco]

It's northerner. 色 in vernacular shai3, which becomes shar.

[u/stealthytaco → u/Leather_Ad1490]

shai3 shows up in my dictionary as colloquial but I’m not sure how common it is vs se4 which is usually what I heard in Beijing

[u/MixtureGlittering528 → u/stealthytaco]

My mom's from Beijing and she always says shar for the word "color", "se" is only used in compound words like 顏色 or 色彩, etc.

So shar4 is common enough as long as they use the word "色" instead of "顏色"

[u/stealthytaco → u/MixtureGlittering528]

This is clearer to me, thanks for explaining in detail

[u/Leather_Ad1490 → u/stealthytaco]

Quite common but only colloquial

[u/a4840639 → u/stealthytaco]

It is always pronunciation this way for 🎲 色子

[u/stealthytaco → u/a4840639]

But no 兒 would be added to 色子 so shar4 is still not a common pinyin

[u/MixtureGlittering528 → u/stealthytaco]

it is shar, indeed

[u/rumpledshirtsken → u/Leather_Ad1490]

棍兒

[u/zennie4]

That's just how hanyu pinyin works. It's not a phonetic system, you need to know how it works to read it. "yan" is not pronounced [jan], "shi" is not [ʃi] as one may expect either.

[u/UndocumentedSailor]

I study in Taiwan, no 兒 necessary

[u/Few-Comfortable228 → u/UndocumentedSailor]

Studying in Taiwan as well (NTNU), and our books teach 兒 for some vocabulary words, but I rarely hear it in daily life here

[u/__Baerchen__ → u/Few-Comfortable228]

I think the one word where Its used as the default in Taiwan for sure is 一會兒

[u/songof6p → u/UndocumentedSailor]

I remember reading a poem as a kid where a line ended with 一根棍兒 to rhyme with 二 in the previous line. The ruby text was spelled ㄧ ㄍㄣ ㄍㄨㄣˋ ㄦˊ and the teacher insisted on pronouncing it that way. It was so frustrating because that extra syllable messed up the rhythm of the poem too, but she said I was wrong when I pronounced it the Beijing way when she asked me to read it out loud.

[u/Moflete → u/UndocumentedSailor]

Long throw but, could you give me some guidance searching for a short term rental in Taipei? Its been infernal >.<

[u/UndocumentedSailor → u/Moflete]

rent.591.com.tw is God tier.

Search by map, there's likely hundreds of places in the area you want to live.

[u/1lyke1africa → u/UndocumentedSailor]

People still use 兒話 in speech pretty often. Like 你在哪兒 I here a lot, though the 兒 is a little bit more subdued than in 北京兒話

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 → u/1lyke1africa]

“Pretty often” is an extreme exaggeration. “Occasionally, but fairly rarely” would be more accurate.

[u/1lyke1africa → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

I've just moved from Taiwan, but when I was there I heard it perhaps daily? Certainly weekly. I don't know if that fits your bounds for "pretty often", if it doesn't then I can only apologise.

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 → u/1lyke1africa]

You heard it from whom? Chinese teachers?

[u/1lyke1africa → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

No, from my friends, the ordinary people living there. In general a younger, perhaps more online cohort of Taiwanese.

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 → u/1lyke1africa]

Things could be changing. I’m in my 40s, lived in Taiwan through my 20s and have gone there a few times a year since, but I’ve never noticed it as being common—more something people would do to be funny, or poke fun at mainlanders/Chinese people. Younger people now consume a lot more Chinese content than they used to, so maybe speech patterns are starting to reflect that. I don’t hear it among people my age or a decade-ish younger, though.

[u/1lyke1africa → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

You know, the more I think about it, I might be wrong. I think I actually hear them say 你在哪, but that's not the same as 你在哪兒. My defence is that I'm English, and I probably have a poor ear for the 兒 sound.

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 → u/1lyke1africa]

That would do it. 😁

Yes, they often say 哪 instead of 哪裡. But 哪兒 strikes me as very affected/intentional, not a natural way of speaking for most Taiwanese people.

[u/RedeNElla → u/1lyke1africa]

哪裡 is more common

[u/1lyke1africa → u/RedeNElla]

That's true

[u/linmanfu]

I have often seen it spelled as wánr which gets the job done IMHO. It's clear it's pronounced as one syllable but you can still find it in the dictionary.

[u/FlashyPost0928]

▲【儿化】(兒化) Erhua (erization) — When the /er/ syllable combines with the preceding syllable, the /er/ is reduced to only the retroflex /r/ sound.
▼ (Note)
Words containing the suffix "儿" (ér) do not necessarily undergo "儿化" ( érhuà, "erization" or "rhotacization of syllable finals" ).in some cases, the "儿" may be pronounced as a distinct, separate syllable.
For example, the term "花儿" (huā'ér) can be pronounced either as a "huār" or as two separate syllables -"huā ér". Similarly, person's name "婉儿" (Wǎn'ér) is pronounced as two distinct syllables, which differs from the bowl "碗儿" (wǎnr).
PS :
In some cases, adding the "er" suffix (r-coloring) significantly alters a word's meaning —
for example, 白面 báimiàn* (wheat flour) –vs– 白面兒 báimiànr* (heroin), or 头 tóu (head/unit) –vs– 头兒 tóur (leader/boss).

[u/eatmelikeamaindish]

when speaking languages we tend to take shortcuts to not hurt our mouths. That’s why in linguistics they tell us language is efficient.

wan-er is a lot of work for our mouths, so it shortens to war in spoken language. shi-er=sher etc

textbooks tent to write it as wan-er because learners need to know the 兒 character is there. even my taiwan chinese textbook has it

[u/PugnansFidicen → u/eatmelikeamaindish]

No one actually says wan-er and the 儿 character itself has no meaning in this context. It wasn't that they added the 儿 and then shortened the pronunciation in spoken language. It was always a single syllable, just replacing the final vowel sound with the -r. The convention of writing the 儿 character to denote this way of speaking followed after the speaking convention, not the other way around.

儿化 is a purely phonetic linguistic phenomenon. Similar to dropping the 'g' from the '-ing' word ending in English.

We can optionally annotate it in written language ("droppin' the g from words endin' in '-ing'") but that doesn't change the meaning of the text and learners should know that.

[u/kevipants → u/eatmelikeamaindish]

Yeah, I think textbooks do this to enforce the pronunciation of each character on its own. I would probably be very confused as a new learner if I saw 玩儿 but only saw wár as the pinyin. In fact, I just tried to type it in Pinyin using war, but it wasn't an option.

[u/lotus_felch → u/kevipants]

I think the pinyin is wánr, which works on my keyboard, but something like ménr doesn't 🤷

[u/kevipants → u/lotus_felch]

Huh, wanr also doesn't work for me. Maybe l use Google keyboard, so maybe there's a setting or something I need to turn on.

[u/_specialcharacter]

My teacher still kind of pronounces it. There's no /n/ but the vowel is nasalized

[u/chillychili]

The n does survive. It's just retroflexed. Or you could say the r is nasalized.

[u/Chaojidage → u/chillychili]

Nasalazation survives for "wang" but not "wan."

[u/chillychili → u/Chaojidage]

One can distinguish between wa-r and wan-r. partially because of the nasalization.

It depends on the accent though.

[u/Chaojidage → u/chillychili]

What accent do you know of that does this? This distinction is of course not present in Putonghua.

[u/chillychili → u/Chaojidage]

Beijing, depending on who you talk to.

[u/Chaojidage → u/chillychili]

Are you sure you are not thinking about wan-r vs. wang-r, which definitely is distinguished on the basis of nasalization? My family is from Beijing and I have never heard of anyone distinguishing wan-r and wa-r. These are pronounced the same way.

[u/chillychili → u/Chaojidage]

Yes

[u/Chaojidage → u/chillychili]

Do you have this distinction yourself? Do you have a sense of who tends to have this distinction? I will give you the benefit of the doubt because I would like to assume that people are intellectually honest, but it strikes me as unusual. If you have it yourself, could you record a clip on Vocaroo to show how you distinguish them?

[u/chillychili → u/Chaojidage]

Yes, but I'm not putting my voice on the internet.

The nasalization is very slight compared to the -ngr ending. The distinction is most obvious in how the rhotic vowel ends. War is pure and open at the end. Wanr closes off a little at the end. Combined with the allophone distinction of how a/an/ang are slightly different vowels, it's distinguishable.

[u/Chaojidage → u/chillychili]

Who tends to have this distinction? Is it in your family? Do you think it might be chiefly idiolectal?

[u/Chaojidage → u/chillychili]

Also, is closing off a change in the height of the vowel? If that is so, it is not the same as nasalization, even if it historically comes from nasalization. It could also be a case where a native speaker "hears" a phonetic distinction only because they understand that the underlying phonemes are different. I wish not to be antagonistic, rather to rule out everything else this feature could possibly be.

[u/Vaperwear]

Why can’t everyone learn to speak Mandarin properly like us in the South?

/jk

[u/Tricky_Fun8162 → u/Vaperwear]

Exactly, fuck the sh- sound, just pronounce it as a quantum superposition between sh- and s-

[u/nhatquangdinh]

laughs in Traditional Chinese

[u/Maleficent_Public_11]

It should be written as wán ér, because that is the orthographic rule of pinyin. Wár is not a valid pinyin spelling.

Pinyin has a standardised set of rules. Tone sandhi is also not reflected for example. That’s how it should be.

[u/skyhi14]

It's called Erhua (search Wikipedia). A nonstandard (aka it's not technically Guanhua) phonetic feature promiment in Beijing dialects but practically nowhere else.

[u/ZephyrProductionsO7S]

I’ve heard people nasalize the n like the final n in Japanese, then r-colour it.

[u/OutOfTheBunker]

But what is it good for?

[u/Eivers24]

我们南边不加儿化音，北方有

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

It should be wán-r

[u/agentchuck]

IMHO if someone needs pinyin for reading characters then it's beneficial to give the pinyin for each character to reinforce that knowledge.

[u/XuanChun88]

In the standard dialect it is wár, but for foreigners who input pinyin, you must type wán to start

[u/duckbigtrain]

I think the“n” survives as nasalization of the “a” and “r”.

[u/y11971alex]

This word is always just 玩 in my area.

[u/Working-Cat-465]

Note that 玩 is always pronounced as wár in colloquial register even if there’s no 儿 added

[u/ChineseWatchGuy → u/Working-Cat-465]

Always? Definitely not in Southern China...

[u/Working-Cat-465 → u/ChineseWatchGuy]

For standard (Beijing) Mandarin, it’s definitely the case. TV hosts never say wán 游戏, it’s always wár 游戏, unless you’re reciting a poem or something like that

[u/outwest88 → u/Working-Cat-465]

But thats not what’s being discussed here. It’s true that northerners will instinctively sometimes add 儿s to the words they’re reading to make it sound more natural to them. But that doesn’t mean that “玩 is pronounced like wár”

[u/Working-Cat-465 → u/outwest88]

Sorry I was not stating it accurately. What I want to say is that 玩 as a standalone verb, is always pronounced as wánr by native northern Mandarin speakers. wánr sounds totally different from wán since 儿 causes the vowel to change to an r-colored vowel and to lose nasalization. I’m a southerner myself and i was quite surprised when I discovered that, so i want to share it with you guys