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Guide

The four tones of Mandarin

In Mandarin the pitch of a syllable is part of the word. Get the tone wrong and you have said something else entirely.

English uses pitch for emotion — rising for a question, falling for a statement. Mandarin uses pitch to tell words apart. The syllable ma can mean four different things depending on the tone, so tones are not decoration; they are part of the spelling.

The classic example: one sound, four words

The same syllable ma gives four common characters:

You can hear all the characters that share this sound on the pinyin ma page.

What each tone does

  • 1st tone (mā) — high and flat. Hold a steady, slightly high pitch, like singing one note.
  • 2nd tone (má) — rising. Start in the middle and rise, like the English "huh?" of surprise.
  • 3rd tone (mǎ) — low dipping. Drop low, then rise a little. In normal speech it is mostly just low.
  • 4th tone (mà) — sharp falling. Start high and drop fast, like a firm "No!".
  • Neutral tone — short and light, with no marked pitch. It appears on many grammatical syllables, such as the question word 吗 (ma) and the particle 的 (de).

How to practise tones

Three habits make tones stick:

  1. Learn the tone with the character, not after it. Never store a character as a bare sound; store it with its tone from the very first time you see it.
  2. Practise in minimal pairs. Drilling mā / má / mǎ / mà together trains your ear to hear the contrast, which is harder than producing it.
  3. Listen, then copy out loud. Every character and example sentence on this site has a "Listen" button that uses your device's Chinese voice. Say it back immediately.

One thing that trips up beginners

Tones change in connected speech (tone sandhi). The most common case: when two 3rd tones meet, the first becomes a 2nd tone — 你好 is written nǐ hǎo but said ní hǎo. The number 一 (yī) and the negator 不 (bù) also shift tone depending on what follows. You do not need to memorise the rules up front; you will absorb them by listening.

Ready to apply this? Open the character list and read the first ten characters out loud with their tones, or continue with how to read pinyin.

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