[Chinese Pronunciation] 4 Steps to Mastering the 4 Mandarin Chinese Tones

Tones scare everybody who wants to learn Chinese.

... but they shouldn't.

If you're a native English speaker, you can already make all of the tones in Mandarin Chinese just fine. Chinese speakers just use them differently than you do.

Step 1: Learn the difference between tones and intonation

The only thing standing between most learners and confidence with Mandarin's tones is one simple concept.

Let's clarify that concept.

How English intonation works

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, forgive my voice acting skills and check this out:

I said one word eight different times, changed the way I said it each time, it meant something different each time, and you understood what I meant each time. Incredible, isn't it?

Suffice it to say that English is a very tonal language.

How Mandarin Chinese tones work

Before I tell you what you're supposedly hearing, let's just hear the tones and take a moment to think about what's actually going on. Compare the two sets of audio below, and maybe the audio above. Listen for things like:

The key difference between English and Chinese Pronunciation

You've now heard both, so here's the key point to observe. Per Wikipedia:

You're used to making tones, but they're tied to emotions for you, where they aren't for Mandarin speakers. Or, from another direction: The syllable "ver" is stressed in version but not in over. It just so happens that we pronounce "ver" more strongly in some words and more relaxed in other words. Chinese tones are similarly mechanical: each tone is just a possible "shape" of a Chinese syllable.

If you take your English emotions—see the above table—and keep the melody but subtract the emotion, you end up remarkably close to Chinese's tones.

Step 2: Learn the four tones of the Chinese language

Here are Mandarin's four tones (plus a bonus one!) visualized:

And now let's talk through the chart a bit:

First, practice Chinese tones in isolation

Each tone has a distinct quality. If you can't hear a tone's quality, it will be difficult to produce them yourself. So:

Or, with a Migaku subscription, you can use our Chinese Tone Trainer. We'll play the audio of a one-syllable word, ask you to identify its tone, and build your tonal awareness with immediate feedback.

Next, learn pinyin and the pitch combinations

Tones don't usually exist in isolation: they flow into each other in speech. This in mind, your next step toward mastering the tones is to learn them in pairs: to be familiar with not just "Tone 1" and "Tone 2" but also "Tone 1 → Tone 2".

Migaku makes this easy.

Step 3: Watch YouTube to observe how natives pronounce Mandarin Chinese tones

Your ears are incredibly powerful things. Immersing yourself in the reality of how natives actually talk will often do you more good than reading English explanations of how people supposedly talk. This will lead you to notice things like how two third tones in a row are actually pronounced as a second tone and then a third tone. (This is called tonal sandhi or "tone changes").

So:

We make it easier to understand Chinese videos by generating subtitles if the video doesn't have them, letting you display subtitles in two languages at once, and letting you click on words to see what they mean.

Step 4: Use flashcards to remember and practice Chinese tones

If you stumble into a useful looking word or sentence, just click the orange button in the top-right corner of the dictionary. We'll automatically turn it into a flashcard that looks like this:

We'll periodically nudge you to review words you make flashcards out of until you eventually remember what they mean—and how to pronounce them.

The #1 thing you need to remember if you want to learn Chinese

I moved to Taiwan in 2018, so I get it: Mandarin is intimidating. Tones are scary, pronunciation is scary, Chinese characters are scary. It's a lot.

The thing is, as complex as modern Chinese learning applications are, learning Mandarin is actually very simple:

You do need to get your feet under you somehow, but to really get anywhere with Chinese, you'll eventually need to dive into the deep end and begin spending more time in Chinese and less time in English learning about Chinese.

That transition is scary, too—but Migaku has been purpose-built to make overcoming it as painless as possible. You might even have fun.