The Chinese tones

In some ways, Mandarin Chinese is easier than English - there's no irregular verbs, for example. There's also less sounds than in English, however, the difficulty lies in the pronunciation of the tones. To the untrained ear, tones are a difficult concept - but with a little practice, can be mastered.

You might be more familiar with tones than you may realise. Think of how your voice goes up in pitch when asking a question, for example.

Chinese has four spoken tones, and a fifth neutral tone.

The four tones

The graph below shows how the pitch of your voice varies with the four tones. On Fozza.com, you'll see the tones represented by a number following the word (e.g. hao3), or by accented characters. It takes a lot of practice to train your ears to hear and distinguish between the tones.

The neutral tone

The fifth, neutral tone is flat, with no emphasis. This is normally used by particles appearing at the end of sentences. More on particles later!

Examples

Here's an example of four characters that have the same Pinyin, but four different tones and meanings. In fact, the word "shi" has over 80 different characters and meanings!

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