Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for learners. Catch up on past installments here.
Hey there! I’m Dr. Farrah Neumann, a Duolingo Learning Scientist, and I’m joined by Curriculum Designers Tina Tan and Dr. Adele Touhey. My background is in second language acquisition, and they both have backgrounds in teaching English and Chinese—which is why we’re taking over this edition of Dear Duolingo to bring you an all-star guide to learning tones in Mandarin Chinese!
Our question this week:
Don’t worry, Toned Out, it’s normal to feel challenged by Chinese tones. Any aspect of a language that’s different from your first language can take some getting used to! Tone is absolutely within your grasp—check out the success stories of Xiaomanyc and OMG! Meiyu for inspiration!
There are lots of strategies for practicing tones in Mandarin Chinese—let’s take a look!
In this post:
- What are Chinese tones?
- Why does Chinese have tones?
- How to learn tones
- How to practice tones
- Examples of different speakers’ tones
What are Chinese tones?
Chinese is a tonal language. (This is true of both Mandarin and Cantonese—but we’ll focus just on Mandarin today.) Tones are patterns of your voice going up and down (this is also called pitch).
A tone can be high (like a flute) or low (like a tuba). Tones may make learners of Chinese shake in their boots, but they serve a really important purpose in tonal languages! They help you know what word and meaning is meant. They are just as important as individual sounds like “m” or “a” in English, and changing the tone of a Chinese word—without changing any other sounds—can completely change the meaning.
The good news is that as English speakers, we often hear and pronounce those voice movements, even if we’ve never used the words “pitch” or “tone.” For example, we often make our voice go up at the end of questions, to show that we’re asking something. The difference is that in English, making our voice go up or down, higher or lower, doesn’t change the meaning of a word: The word house always means the same thing no matter if our voice goes up (…house?), stays flat (house), or does anything else (HOUSE!). So for English speakers learning a tonal language like Mandarin Chinese, we just have to work a little harder to change the pitch of our voice for *each* syllable!
Why does Chinese have tones?
Chinese has fewer consonants and vowels than English does (for example, there is no “v” sound in Chinese), so there are fewer ways to combine sounds into unique words. That’s where tones come in! Tone allows Chinese to more than quadruple the number of words that speakers can make using the same number of vowels and consonants.
Chinese isn’t the only language that uses tones—lots of other languages spoken in Asia, Africa, and the Americas do, too! And the number of tones in a language can vary—it’s not unusual for a tone language to have 5-6 tones, and Wobé, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, may have as many as 14!
How to learn tones
Every Chinese word has tone. There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese, and their names tell you how each is pronounced:
- Steady: Keep your voice should be high and steady, without raising or lowering it
- Rising: Make your voice go up
- Falling-rising: Make your voice start low, go lower and then up
- Falling: Make your voice go down
Beginner Chinese learners will find Pinyin (a Romanized way of writing Chinese) really helpful in learning tones, because this writing system has a distinct symbol for each tone. You can see them in the words mā, má, mǎ, and mà, and they sort of mimic what your voice has to do when you say them! Those four different tones create four totally different words with four totally different meanings: mother, hemp, horse, and scold, to be exact!
So you can see why tone matters so much: You wouldn’t want to accidentally refer to your mother (mā) as a horse (mǎ), ask for soup (tāng) in your coffee when you really wanted sugar (táng), or say you want to kiss (wěn) someone when you only wanted to ask (wèn) a question! These tones change the meaning of words just as much as if you replaced the letter “c” in the word cat with something else: hat, sat, rat, mat—you get the idea!
These four Chinese tones are numbered, but the numbers don’t refer to any inherent order; they’re just a way to know which tone people are referring to. In the table below, you’ll see each of these tones, with tips on how to pronounce them.
| Tone | What it sounds like | Visual reminder |
|---|---|---|
| Tone 1: steady Example: 妈 (mā) Meaning: mother |
High-pitched and steady: Imagine your doctor has told you to open your mouth and say Ahhhh…, and then hold that pitch steady! |  Ahhhh… |
| Tone 2: rising Example: 麻 (má) Meaning: hemp |
Starts low and rises high at the end: Imagine you are saying What?!? after your friend shares some juicy gossip. |  What?!? |
| Tone 3: falling-rising Example: 马 (mǎ) Meaning: horse |
Starts low, dips lower, and then rises up a little bit: It sounds similar to the way you would say Well… if your friend asks if you have a new love interest and the answer is yes (!). |  Well… |
| Tone 4: falling Example: 骂 (mà) Meaning: scold |
Starts high and falls to end low: It has a similar pitch as a forceful No! |  No! |
You can also visualize Chinese tones with a tone chart, like the one below. It shows you how high or low your voice is at the beginning of the tone, whether it rises, falls, or remains steady during the tone, and how high or low it is at the end:
How to practice tones
Now that you’ve got a solid understanding of what tone is and why it’s so important, here’s how you can practice hearing and pronouncing tones!
Listening
Research shows that learning to better hear sounds will make you better able to pronounce them, too. So start by tuning your ear to the differences between the tones!
- Complete your daily Duolingo lessons to keep training your ear. Duolingo uses many different speakers, words, and contexts, which is extremely effective at helping you learn sounds and tones in your new language!
- While you do your lessons, keep a log of the new words you learn, and note the tones of each word using the Pinyin symbols (ā, á, ǎ, or à).
- Listen to many examples of tone. As you do your Chinese lessons in Duolingo, tap on the speaker icon to replay words and sentences to identify which tones you hear. Then check your guess against the Pinyin in the lesson. This handy Pinyin table is also a fun way to play around with tones and isolate the differences.
- Once you think you’ve got a handle on what each tone sounds like, test your skills using this Arch Chinese tool.
Speaking
In addition to listening practice, pronunciation practice is a research-backed way to improve your speaking. Here are some ways to practice your speaking:
- Repeat and exaggerate as you use Duolingo. Try to match the pronunciation of everything you hear, even if it’s not a speaking exercise! This can help you improve both your listening skills and your pronunciation. Also, if you exaggerate the tones while you practice, the important differences between them will still shine through even once you are speaking more naturally.
- Be true to yourself. Each person has a unique range of how high and low their speaking voice is, and the same is true for tones. Don’t worry about matching the speaker’s pitch exactly; instead, focus more on how your voice moves. A small child’s lowest tone will still likely be higher pitched than a grown adult’s highest tone, but it’s all about how each of your tones compare to each other!
Examples of different speakers’ tones
Listening to different speakers pronounce the same tones side-by-side is a great way to train your ear! Notice how no two voices sound the same—even when they’re saying the same thing—but each speaker makes a clear distinction between each of the tones:
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 妈 (mā) mother |
妈 | 妈 | 妈 | 妈 |
| 麻 (má) hemp |
麻 | 麻 | 麻 | 麻 |
| 马 (mǎ) horse |
马 | 马 | 马 | 马 |
| 骂 (mà) scold |
骂 | 骂 | 骂 | 骂 |
| 汤 (tāng) soup |
汤 | 汤 | 汤 | 汤 |
| 糖 (táng) sugar |
糖 | 糖 | 糖 | 糖 |
| 吻 (wěn) kiss |
吻 | 吻 | 吻 | 吻 |
| 问 (wèn) ask |
问 | 问 | 问 | 问 |
Get outside your comfort *tone*
Tones are certainly challenging, but by practicing your listening and speaking skills, you’ll notice that tones get a little bit easier every day! 💚