Pronunciation
Chinese Pronunciation and Text-to-Speech
Chinese menu words are easier to remember when they can be heard. Use the speaker buttons next to Chinese terms to hear browser text-to-speech pronunciation.
How it works
Pages on ChinatownMenu.com automatically detect Chinese characters and place a small speaker button next to each detected word or phrase. The pronunciation is generated by your browser or operating system.
The default voice is Mandarin. The control box on pages with Chinese terms also lets you try Taiwan Mandarin or Hong Kong/Cantonese when your device supports those voices.
The romanization you see next to Chinese words may follow different systems. Standard Mandarin is usually written in pinyin, the system adopted by the Library of Congress and widely used by publishers and search tools. Cantonese is often written in Jyutping, a system proposed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993, so the same menu item may sound different and also be spelled differently depending on the language setting.
Sample menu words
Limitations
Browser text-to-speech is useful for orientation, but it is not the same as a native speaker, a dialect-specific recording, or a restaurant staff member saying the word aloud. Many Chinese restaurant terms also have Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Shanghainese, or other regional readings that may differ from Mandarin.
Voice quality also depends on what your device exposes through the browser speech-synthesis system.
In practice, one phone may offer only a general Mandarin voice, while another may expose options
such as zh-CN, zh-TW, or yue-HK. If the browser does not
supply a Cantonese-capable voice in its available voice list, the site cannot create a truly
Cantonese reading on its own.