What you say about pinyin u and ü works fine for me. But I want to ask about a variant on ü that I sometimes hear, for example in John Pasden’s tone drills. It seems the speaker has a more extreme pronunciation of ü, so that 军 rhymes with the English word queen. Even 去 there rhymes with the English tree. Is this a regional thing? Or do you think I am just mis-hearing those speakers?
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Yo your right it’s regional. I used to chat with this lady from Sichuan province and when I said 去 she would always correct me and say what sounded to me like “chewey” . I never had anyone else correct me for that one. I just wrote it off as some way she said things. Now there is also a different stronger ü like for characters 語 or 魚 or 女 but that’s another thing.
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And 運 does kinda rhyme with queen. Kind of.
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Hi!
Does this < ü > exit in pinyin too? I thought there are only 4 tones.
Hi Philips,
The ü sound is indeed quite complicated. There are no specific “variants” of ü, but different pinyin methods that sort of change the pronunciations. Remember that if you see a ‘u’ with ‘j,q,x,y’ in front of it, it is automatically pronounced with a ü pronunciation. The spelling rule makes it so that the two dots are omitted. So as discussed by above users, 军 or 去 [jūn or qù] are pronounced with the ü sound. They should be thought of as having the same base sound as 女 or 鱼 [nǚ or yú].
Check out our lesson that goes into the specifics of this final ü: https://www.chinesepod.com/lesson/pinyin-section-16
Hope this helps!
Betty
Thank you BettyZheng for the sound explanation 
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