The tones

As I mentioned before in the lessons Chinese is not Japanese and The importance of learning Chinese characters, Chinese is a tonal language. This means that each word is pronounced with a different tone, which is extremely important to distinguish different meanings in case of words pronounced with the same syllable.

The tone is the height of the sound emission of the vowel or the vocalic group of the syllable.

Standard Chinese has four tones:

The first, represented by the mark ̅ , is characterised by a steady high and longer sound
The second, represented by the mark / , is characterised by a rising and shorter sound, similar to the English question “What?”
The third, represented by the mark ˘, is characterised initially by a falling sound and then by a rising sound
The fourth, represented by the mark \, is characterised by an abrupt and brief sound.

All these marks are placed above the vowel of the syllable and, of course, can be found only in the phonetic transcription. Manage to memorize all these tones is precisely one of the problems one encounters when studying Chinese. Once you get past the pinyin, it is easy to say one thing for another just by pronouncing a word with the wrong tone.

On the picture below, you can see how the syllable ma, pronounced in the four tones can have completely different meanings.

There is also a fifth tone, called neutral. In fact, it is not represented by any graphic mark and it is characterised by a shorter and lighter sound.

Examples of neutral tones are:

吗 (ma) modal particle placed at the end of the sentence to make the interrogative statement,
the second syllabe of words made up of repeated syllables, such as 谢谢 (xièxie) “thank you”,
the structural particle 的 (de),
the indicator of plurality 们 (men), used only after personal pronouns or nouns referring to a person.

To understand more clearly the pronunciation of the different tones, I recommend watching this video.

Cover background picture by Freddie Marriage