The Four Tones

Spoken Chinese uses 4 distinct tones or variations of pitch over time. While pronouncing a syllable (a single character is a syllable), you have to control and vary your pitch. The pitch variations of each tone are executed over the entire syllable. The four tones are as follows:

1. First Tone:  High and flat. The pitch starts and stays high.
2. Second Tone:  Medium and rising. The pitch starts medium and rises.
3. Third Tone:  Dipping then rising. The pitch starts medium-low, dips to very low and then rises to medium high.
4. Fourth Tone:  High then falling. The pitch starts high and falls quickly to low.

The four tones are represented pictorial on the following Tone Chart:

Absolute pitch in spoken Mandarin is not important. In other words, you do not have to be a good singer to speak good Chinese. It is only important that you vary the pitch accurately. You can listen to a man and a woman speak the same phrase and be able to identify the same discrete tone pattern, even though their voices will sound nothing alike.

Speaking with proper tones is essential for being understood since the same syllable spoken with a different tone can have a very different meaning. For example, the syllable “ma” spoken with different tones will have different meanings (Actually there are over 15 words pronounced “ma”, not only the 4 shown here):

• 1st Tone ma means “mother”
• 2nd Tone ma means “hemp”
• 3rd Tone ma means “horse”
• 4th Tone ma means “to scold”

If you are not careful, you might refer to someone’s mother as “horse”!

Characters and Pinyin

Written Chinese is a character or symbol based system. Since an “alphabet” is not employed, the majority of Chinese characters offer no clues as to how they are pronounced. In other words, you cannot “sound out” Chinese characters like we do with English words. Chinese people learning to read and write must memorize how each character is written, how it is pronounced and what it means. That’s a lot of memorization of some very complex characters. A task of this size and difficulty seems insurmountable to us non-Chinese folks. But don’t fret, there is a “friendly” tool we can use.

During the 1950’s the Chinese government developed and adopted a romanized alphabet system to assist with learning the Chinese language. I heard this was done to facilitate teaching their Russian comrades of the time how to speak Chinese. More recently, the system has gained popularity in China and become indispensable for non-Chinese attempting to learn the language. The system, known as “pinyin” (“spell sound”), does allow one to speak Chinese with “hen biaozhun” (“very standard”) pronunciation. The pinyin spelling is what you often see on hotels, signs and buildings in China alongside the equivalent Chinese characters. As an example, the city names “Beijing” and “Shanghai” are both two syllable words in pinyin spelling form. 

Note:  Mainland China has a a single official system. Other places use somewhat different systems. For example, Taiwan and Hong Kong spellings will be different than their mainland counterparts and different from each other. We recommend learning the mainland system first. After all, China is the “Big Dragon”.

A Mandarin syllable spelled using pinyin may or may not include an initial consonant, will have a vowel or combination of vowels, sometimes include a “final” such as “n”, “ng” or “r” and have a tone mark. We haven’t discussed tone marks yet but they are easy since they graphically represent each of the fours tones discussed earlier. Taking our example for the syllable “ma” we can add tone marks as follows:

Pronunciation Guide

NOTE: If the following pronunciation discussion makes you dizzy, then visit our Easy Guide to pronunciation. It’s unsophisticated but, hey, it works!

The initials are found at the beginning of Chinese syllables.  Their pinyin pronunciations are approximately the same as they are in English with five main exceptions. The pronunciation exceptions are for the consonants c, q, x, z and zh.:

• c is like ts in rats
• q is like ch in cheese with tongue forward
• x is like sh in sheet with tongue forward
• z is like dz or the ds in kids
• zh is like j in jerk with tongue back

The vowels and finals are found in the middle and at the beginning of Chinese syllables.  They are pronounced as follows:

• a is like the a in father
• ai is like the ai in aisle
• ao is like the ow in now
• e is like the u in up, except after i, u or y, sounds like a long a (ex: ye sounds like yay)
• ei is like the ei in weigh
• en is like the en in open
• eng is like the ung in hung
• i is like the i in machine, except in zhi, chi, shi and ri like r in shirt, in zi, ci and si like z in quiz
• iu is like the eo in Leo
• o is like o in more
• ong is like oh followed by ng
• ou is like ough in though
• u is like oo in boo, except after j, q, x and y it sounds like German ü or French eu
• ui is like way in sway
• ü is like ee in knee but with lips rounded (only found after l and n)

Go to Easy Guide

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