As a teacher of Chinese language, I often found that students, even some textbook CD or online video tutorials, read Hanyu Pinyin vowel o as wo expressed in Chinese character `喔`. But actually we should read the sound of o expressed in Chinese character '噢'.
When I was a child，my teacher taught everyone to read the vowel O as wo ‘喔’. The teacher taught like this." the rooster crows ‘o’ ‘o’ ‘o’(喔喔喔).
But After studying in the Normal University(师范大学), while I was preparing for my Mandarin Proficiency Test, I was taught to correct the sound. The vowel o should be pronounced as ‘o’(噢) instead of ‘wo’ (喔)
I went online and searched for information on why o should be read as ‘o’ not ‘wo’ and why people pronounce it as ‘wo’ . Now I summarize the information here.
Why o should be read as ‘o’ not ‘wo’? In theory the pronunciations of “o” and “wo” are obviously different: when the sound single vowel o, the lips are round, and there is no change with the mouth shape. But when we sound ‘wo’, a syllable, we first sound ‘w’, and then slide to ‘o’ sound. When we group two sounds together, the mouth shape has a change process. Also if we pronounce ‘o’ as ‘wo’, why do we need the two-letter syllable ‘wo’?
Why people pronounce it as ‘wo’? ‘Wo’ （喔）originally has two sounds. One sounds the same as ‘o’ (噢), used as an exclamation word. Another sound is ‘wo’, which is the sound a rooster makes. In the "Chinese Pinyin Vowels Table", the pronunciation of the vowel o is given the Chinese character "喔". They meant to take the "o" sound instead of the "wo" sound. Many teachers in the dialect area only know that “喔” read ‘wo’. So for a long time, in the pinyin teaching in schools in some areas, the vowel o was mistakenly pronounced as “wo (喔)”. In addition to the above reason, the teacher’s misleading teaching is also derived from the textbook. There is a rooster beside the o in the textbook, so the teacher comes up with the sentence: "The rooster crowing '喔' mimics the sound of the vowel o."
Fortunately Modern Chinese Dictionary already revised o into “噢 (o)" instead of the original "喔 (wo)", so for the "Chinese Pinyin Vowels Table", maybe we should draw a circle mouth shape and says: the round mouth o o o.
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