Standard Chinese tones vs. English

This blog post gives tips for getting started with Standard Chinese tones. It helps that all of them have equivalents in English (some of them looser than others).

(Disclaimer: I’m a beginner in Standard Chinese. But I’ve done a lot of research to figure out how to best learn that language.)

1. 1 What are tones?
2. 2 The five tones of standard Chinese
3. 3 The rising and falling tones (2nd and 4th)
4. 4 The high tone (1st)
5. 5 The low tone (3rd)
6. 6 The neutral tone (5th)
7. 7 Tones in songs
8. 8 Practicing tones
9. 9 Conclusion

1 What are tones?

A tone is a way to pronounce the same syllable differently, by changing the pitch of our voice. English uses pitch changes for sentences – e.g. to signal questions:

• If we ask the question “Food?” then the pitch starts low and ends higher. We used pitch to indicate that the word “food” is a question.
• If we reply with “Food!” then the pitch starts high and ends lower. We used pitch to indicate that the word “food” is a positive reply to the previous question.

We said the same syllable “food” with two different “tones” and the meaning changed!

Standard Chinese uses tones more extensively:

• Every syllable has its own tone (vs. per-sentence pitch changes in English).
• The tone of a syllable has a strong impact on its meaning. To Chinese ears, the same syllable with different tones can sound as different as “bed” and “bad” sound to the ears of English-speakers.

2 The five tones of standard Chinese

Standard Chinese has five tones. Let’s first take a quick look at all tones before we get into how each one of them is pronounced.

Tone	Description	Pinyin
1st	high	mā, ma1	妈	mom
2nd	rising	má, ma2	麻	hemp
3rd	low	mǎ, ma3	马	horse
4th	falling	mà, ma4	骂	to scold
5th	neutral	ma	吗	question particle

• To hear the pronunciation of the different tones, go to interactive pinyin chart by Yoyo Chinese and click on “ma” (2nd row, 4th column).
• Pinyin uses accents or numbers to describe the tone of a syllable. These are a few Chinese words with tone accents:
  • 中国 (zhōngguó) China
  • 朋友 (péngyǒu) friend
  • 漂亮 (piàoliàng) beautiful; brilliant
  • 什么 (shénme) what [note: “me” has the neutral tone]
• To remember the numbers of the tones, we can use that the accents, written out, look like an “M” with a prefixed underscore: _/V\

3 The rising and falling tones (2nd and 4th)

Recall the examples from the beginning of this post:

• “Food?” has the rising tone: It starts low and ends higher.
• “Food!” has the falling tone: It starts high and ends lower.

Therefore:

• If we say “má”, it sounds like a question.
• If we say “mà”, it sounds like a positive reply or a statement.

Tips:

• If I want to get a rising or a falling tone right, I go back and forth between rising (question) and falling (statement) until I have a good feeling for the difference between the two.
• It also helps me to focus on where the pitch is highest: at the beginning (falling tone) or at the end (rising tone).

4 The high tone (1st)

The 1st tone is high and flat. Loose equivalent in English: Saying a long, over-the-top “no” with a high-pitched voice so that it almost sounds like singing.

5 The low tone (3rd)

The 3rd tone is often explained as low, then falling even lower, then rising slightly. But, especially for beginners, it’s easier to consider it to be the opposite of the 1st tone: We use our lowest voice pitch to pronounce a syllable (vs. our highest).

An equivalent in English is “vocal fry”. This is a great video about it.

6 The neutral tone (5th)

With the neutral tone, a syllable is pronounced “naturally”, as you would inside a sentence in English.

This tone is relatively rare (click on a word to go to a page where you can listen to its pronunciation):

• Two of the few cases where a syllable consistently has that tone:
  • If pronounced “zi”, the character 子 nominalizes a word – e.g.: 孩子 (háizi).
  • The final interrogative particle 吗 (ma) is put at the end of a sentence to turn it into a yes/no question.
• Sometimes a word with two or more syllable switches to the neutral tone for syllables after the first one.

7 Tones in songs

In songs, the melody also has pitch changes and therefore competes with the tones. The melody always wins – which means that lyrics aren’t always easy to understand, even for native-speakers.

Quoting Chloe Wei on Mastodon: “As a Chinese, I couldn't understand most of the songs without reading the subtitles. Frankly speaking, I am not a regular music listener. And Chinese is a tonal language so that when you sing, some of the tones change that could make the whole sentence unrecognizable. Even if you keep the tones right, there are always different characters that could be pronounced the same way which can deeply confuse you. Or you may encounter songs that sung in a certain dialect that you don't understand.”

“Also, [providing] subtitles [is] a mandatory thing in China. To promote better understanding and writing of Chinese among teenagers and adults, every movie, tv show and music video are required to put standard mandarin subtitles on.”

8 Practicing tones

You can find videos on YouTube that quiz you on tones: You first hear the pronounciation of a word and then have to guess its tone(s). These are two examples (I searched for “chinese tone drills”):

• “Pinyin dictation” (Chinative) [70 min.]
• “Pinyin Tone Listening Test” (Mandarin Click) [4 min.]

I also tried that search for normal web pages but the results I got either had limited functionality or you had to pay for going beyond single syllables.

9 Conclusion

I hope this blog post has given you a first idea of Chinese tones. Further reading (topics beyond the scope of this post):

• “Tone change rules” on AllSet Learning
• Optional knowledge: “Tone pairs” on AllSet Learning. Some people find that thinking in tone pairs helps them with pronouncing words.