Hi! Today I learned 漂亮 in my HSK1 course, and 漂 appears like piào instead of piāo.
Greetings!
1 Like
One of the joys (or horrors depending on your POV) is that characters don’t have 1 meaning or one pronunciation. 漂 can be 1st, 3rd or 4th depending on the intended meaning, and is basically a perfect use case of why “tones are important”. This is what my popup dictionary looks like when I mouse over 漂:
But any dictionary will show you similar. Super annoying for learners but something you just have to get used to. It happens quite a a lot.
The HH team, for consistency just pick one meaning/pronunciation and stick with it. They pick that one based on which meaning has the most words that also use that meaning. The “elegant” meaning of 漂 used in 漂亮 has less uses so they went with the “to float” meaning of 漂 as their default one.
You just have to pickup the other meanings/pronunciations yourself outside of HH. When starting out I asked basically the exact same thing about why 还 being taught as huán not hái as in 还是.
4 Likes
In addition to what @kaysik said, we do have a plan to at least mention these alternate pronunciations for characters, probably sometime this week, along with “blocking” an answer that is “correct” but not the specific one we want to teach and reinforce. I.e., if one types in “piao4” instead of “piao1” we would have a pop-up that says “That is a valid answer, but we are looking for a different (more common? more used?) pronunciation!”. Really looking forward to when we get around to this, it’ll help a bunch around this point of confusion in Chinese and HanziHero.
5 Likes