Learning Mandarin: What Are All Those Tones?

Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and this can seem daunting to someone learning Mandarin, or even just thinking about learning a language so different from English. Cantonese has even more tones, but since most Westerners who want to speak Chinese are interested in Mandarin, we’ll stick with it here.

(Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Cantonese is widely spoken in southeastern China and Hong Kong. There are numerous other versions of the Chinese.)

My father spoke pretty good Mandarin and we knew a lot of Chinese people. I remember learning early on that if I didn’t pronounce the greeting I had been taught for “hello,” I would accidentally be saying, “You are a good horse.” The difference was all in the tones.

So tones are essential in speaking Chinese.

1. The first Mandarin tone is a high level. However high your voice can go without wavering, that’s your high level.
2. The second tone is rising. This is what we do in English when we ask a question. Our voices go up in tone at the end of the question. In Mandarin, the rising tone sounds like that, but it does not mean that you are asking a question.
3. The third tone falls and then rises again. It starts in the middle of your vocal range, falls deeply, and then rises a little bit right at the end of the sound.
4. The fourth tone is falling. It starts at a high pitch and falls. It is sometimes said that it sound like the person saying it is giving an order.
5. The neutral tone, or fifth tone, doesn’t rise or fall at all.

If you start learning Mandarin, you will see accent marks indicating the first four tones in the Romanized pinyin you will be using. Even if you also learn traditional Chinese characters, virtually every method of teaching Mandarin to foreigners will also use pinyin, which uses our alphabet to spell out Chinese words phonetically.

So that’s a start on understanding tones. In any Chinese program or course that you take, you will get plenty of practice. You won’t need to repeat my mistake and tell people that they are good horses!

Here's my review of Rocket Chinese, one of my favorite programs for learning Mandarin. See the menu for more.