Mandarin Words with Erhua

What is Erhua?

Simplified Chinese: 儿化. Pinyin: érhuà.

A phenomenon of adding nonsyllabic final “r 儿” to a word in spoken Mandarin Chinese. Erhua is also called r-coloring sound or retroflex final.

Actually, the tail sound "r" doesn’t add any additional meaning to the meaning in most cases.

Erhua

Where is Erhua used?

It is most commonly used in the northern part of China, especially in the Beijing dialect. The Beijing dialect has many more usages of “er” throughout the dialect.

By contrast, many Southern Chinese may have difficulty pronouncing the “er” sound. In most cases, they simply prefer not to pronounce it, and usually avoid words with Erhua when speaking Standard Chinese.

e.g.

Instead of 哪儿 nǎr (where), they say哪里 nǎlǐ.

Rather than 好玩儿 hǎo wánr (fun), they say好玩 hǎo wán.

And in place of 事儿 shìr (thing), they say 事情　shìqíng.

Rules of Using Erhua

When do I use 儿 to modify a word? That confused many people who are learning Mandarin Chinese. Actually, usage of “er” in Chinese varies from region to region and sometimes person to person.

Despite the fact that some people see Erhua as a dialect of Chinese language, it is used quite often in modern standard Mandarin Chinese. For instance, "小孩儿" is spoken more frequently than “小孩” in both north and south China. And “一会儿” sounds really strange without a '儿'. Cases like above are not rare.

Erhua rules in Chinese are not standardized and perhaps there are no specific rules, just some generalizations.

The idea is to avoid using erhua in general and pay attention to the cases that must have it.

Words with Erhua in Mandarin

Now we list the most commonly used words with Erhua sound in standard Mandarin Chinese.

The Erhua words include but are not limited to the above examples.