How to pronounce 百度 (Baidu, the top search engine in China) in Chinese
Baidu is the top search engine in China. According to an interesting interview with CEO Robin Li, they have 99% of search marketshare in China with 420 million active users. They also have a $40 billion market cap and are listed on the Nasdaq. That's pretty hardcore.
Baidu is made up of two characters, 百 and 度. First, 百 is pronounced bai3 and means "hundred". Second, 度 is pronounced du4 and means "degree".
Here is how you pronounce Baidu (百度):
The first word sounds just like buy or bye in English. The second word sounds just like the word do or dew.
For pronunciation, the first word is pronounced with the 3rd tone, which be a long syllable that drops in pitch and then rises again. However, it is a special case when a 3rd tone is followed by a 4th tone. In this case the 3rd tone is simply pronounced as a short syllable with a low pitch.
The second word is pronounced with a short syllable and a falling pitch.
Combined, it sounds like:
"buy" [say with a low voice] "do" [say with higher voice, sharp dropping tone].
Google translate actually gets the tone pretty good in terms of the low pitch voice followed by the higher voice with sharp dropping tone. It's good to copy the tones from here (just click the "listen" button on the right: http://translate.google.com/#auto|en|%E7%99%BE%E5%BA%A6. But on Google for some reason the translator is pronouncing the first word as bay instead of buy which is wrong.
Got a word you want to know how to pronounce? Tell us which one!