A Beginner’s Experience of Chinese Tones

Please note that this article uses Simplified Chinese characters, which some devices may not be able to support. Click here to access a version of the article which uses Pinyin instead.

你好！ The other day I was watching a film with my parents – Hidden Strike. You may have heard of it, it’s on Netflix, and, at time of writing, it’s ranked in the top 20. There’s an interesting scene in the film, where it emerges that one of the protagonists, a stereotypical-looking action antihero, played by WWE wrestler John Cena, can speak Chinese. His new-found companion, played by martial arts legend Jackie Chan, then asks him where he learned to speak the language. Cena replies “上海市，死人安排公司” – In Shanghai, at the funeral parlour.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t quite what he’s trying to say! In fact, as Chan then points out, he actually means “私人安保公司” – at the private security company. Although the thing that caught my eye was not the error in the Mandarin, but rather the way the English subtitles explained the humour in the exchange. They added in a line saying “first tone, not third”, in order to convey the triviality of the difference in pronunciation, so that an English-speaking viewer could get the joke. That got me thinking about the significance of tones in Chinese, and that’s what this week’s post is all about.

How Mandarin Sounds Work

As you may know, Mandarin Chinese is written using special characters (known as 汉字). These characters always represent whole syllables, and often whole words. Most syllables in Chinese are composed of an “initial” and a “final” sound (I say most, because a few only have finals) and there are a finite number of each, giving just over 800 possible combinations. However, the actual number of ‘valid’ combinations is only about half of that. So that gives us 400-ish different sounds for over 50,000 possible characters.

The Problem?

How on Earth can sinophones (Chinese-speaking people) even begin to know which character (and therefore which word) is being spoken, if 125 different characters sound identical‽

The Solution

Basically, these 125 same-sounding characters are divided into groups, which are pronounced slightly differently. Five groups, to be precise, each containing around 25 characters, give or take a few. This is, theoretically, a lot more manageable, considering that context will play a significant role in determining how many of these 25 might realistically make sense in the sentence. These five groups are, you guessed it, the tones, whose primary function is to help differentiate between characters, which would otherwise sound identical. To help you get to grips with the tones – or to help you remind yourself, if you’ve already got some experience of them – I’ve given an outline of the sound of all five tones, as well as an example character using each one, below:

Tone 1: Flat

The first tone is a level tone, which is indicated by a macron (a flat line over a vowel) in Pinyin. It is pronounced with a relatively high pitch, and remains unchanging for the duration of the syllable.

妈 – mā: mother, mum

Tone 2: Rising

The second tone is a rising tone. You’ll recognise this intonation from questions in English, where your pitch raises at the end of the sentence. The only difference here is that this change happens within a single syllable, and can happen several times within a phrase or sentence. In Pinyin, this is denoted using an acute accent, as frequently seen in French and Spanish.

嘛 – má: hemp, fibre

Tone 3: Falling-Rising

The third tone is perhaps the hardest one to master – at least, I find it the hardest! The way I remember this one is by copying the path of the caron (the accent on top of the vowel) with my voice. You start medium, then go lower, and then go back up again. Try that a few times in quick succession – you’ll start sounding like a car alarm!

马 – mǎ: horse

Tone 4: Falling

The fourth tone is also quite tricky – it’s easy to make it sound like the neutral tone, if you’re not paying attention. This one starts fairly high, and rapidly falls to a very low pitch. It can sound a little odd at first, but with practice you should start getting used to the sound.

骂 – mà: scold, tell off

The Neutral Tone

The neutral tone is just that – neutral. There’s no particular tonal indication in the Pinyin, because syllables with neutral tone are pronounced without particular emphasis or stress. The vowel sound is still made in the same way, but there is no specific tone, or tonal change.

吗 – ma: [question particle]

I hope that’s given you a good sense of what the tones are, and how to pronounce each one. As you can hopefully see from the examples above, working on your tones and getting them right can save you from accidentally calling your mother a horse – definitely worth the time! Don’t worry too much to begin with, though. The chances are, the context of what you’re saying will help people know what you mean, and if not, there’s always the option to write it down to be certain. If you know the Pinyin of the characters you want to write, you can often use a Chinese Pinyin keyboard on your smartphone. Of course, there’s also the option to write characters by hand, although that in itself might take a whole separate blog post to figure out!