Mandarin 4 Tones: How to Say Each Tone, with Audio

Mandarin Chinese has four tones, plus a short, light neutral tone. A tone is the pitch pattern of a syllable: high and flat, rising, low, or falling. The same sounds with a different tone make a different word, so the tone is part of the word, just like its vowels and consonants.

The classic example is ma. Play each one and listen to the pitch, not the sounds:

The 4 tones at a glance

Tones are usually described on a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 is the top of your normal speaking voice and 1 is the bottom. What matters is the shape and where it sits in your own range. A deep voice and a high voice use the same shapes.

Tone	Shape	Sounds a bit like
1st · ā	high and level (5 → 5)	holding a note when you sing
2nd · á	rising (3 → 5)	“What?” when you didn’t hear someone
3rd · ǎ	low (2 → 1); dips and rises again when said alone	a low, doubtful “hmm”
4th · à	falling (5 → 1)	a firm “No!”
neutral · a	short and light, pitch set by the tone before	the unstressed “-er” in “teacher”

First tone: high and level

Start near the top of your voice and stay there, without rising or falling. It is the tone learners most often say too low, which makes it sound like a sleepy version of the word.

Common mistake: letting the pitch drop at the end. English speakers do this at the end of every sentence, and a first tone that drops starts to sound like a fourth tone. Keep it flat all the way.

Second tone: rising

Start in the middle of your voice and rise to the top, the way your voice goes up in “Really?”. The rise should be clear and fairly quick.

Common mistake: starting too low and rising too late. That sounds like a third tone. Start from your normal speaking pitch.

Third tone: low

The third tone is the one with the most confusing description. Textbooks draw it as a dip and a rise (2 → 1 → 4), but most of the time it is just low: you go down to the bottom of your voice and stay there, often with a slight creak. This “half third tone” is what you hear whenever a third tone comes before another syllable, which is most of the time.

You only hear the full dip and rise when a third tone is said on its own, or at the end of a phrase.

Common mistake: doing the full dip and rise in the middle of a sentence. It makes speech sound slow and sing-song. Think “low” and stop there.

One rule to know now: two third tones in a row do not both stay third tones. The first one is said as a second tone, so 你好 nǐhǎo is said ní hǎo. Dictionaries still write the original tones. The details are in Tone changes.

Fourth tone: falling

Start high and drop all the way down, quickly and firmly, like a short command: “Stop!” or “No!”. It is short, and it should sound decisive.

Common mistake: falling only halfway. A fourth tone that falls from the middle sounds unsure and can be heard as a first tone. Start higher than you think and finish at the bottom.

The neutral tone: light and short

Some syllables have no tone of their own. They are said briefly and lightly, and they have no mark in pinyin. The neutral tone is common in grammar words such as 的 de and 吗 ma, in suffixes like 们 in 我们 wǒmen, and in the second syllable of many everyday words.

Its pitch depends on the tone before it: after a third tone it sits higher than the third tone (listen to 我们), and after the other tones it is lower. You do not need to plan this. If you say the syllable short and relaxed, the pitch mostly takes care of itself.

How tones are written

Tone marks go over a vowel: ā á ǎ à. The neutral tone has no mark. When a syllable has more than one vowel, the mark goes:

1. on a or e if there is one: hǎo, méi;
2. on the o of ou: dōu, zǒu;
3. otherwise on the last vowel: duì, liù, guó.

Tone numbers are used when marks are hard to type: ma1 ma2 ma3 ma4, with 5 or nothing for the neutral tone. Every word page on ChineseDict shows the numbers next to the marked pinyin, and they are also how you type tones in many apps. See Typing pinyin.

Colours. All pinyin on this site is coloured by tone, so the pattern of a word is visible before you play it: first, second, third, fourth, neutral.

Practise with tone pairs

Single syllables are only half the job. In real speech every tone sits next to another one, and each combination has its own feel. Most Chinese words have two syllables, so the 20 combinations below cover the patterns you will hear most. Work through one group at a time and copy each word out loud. The small numbers show the pair: 0 is the neutral tone.

Pairs that learners find hardest: 2 + 3 (苹果: the rise has to finish before the low tone starts), 3 + 3 (the first becomes a second tone, so 你好 sounds like 2 + 3), and 4 + 4 (the second fall starts lower than the first, but both must fall).

How to practise tones

• Learn every word with its tone. A word without its tone is half a word. Fixing a wrong tone later is much harder than learning it right.
• Hum it first. Say mmm with the pitch of the word before saying the word. The melody is easier to hear without the sounds.
• Use your hand. Draw the shape in the air as you speak: flat, up, low, down.
• Practise in phrases. Tones change shape in connected speech. When a single word is read at the end of a sentence, its pitch falls with the sentence; while making the audio for this site, a first tone read that way came out sounding like a fourth tone. So the word recordings here are taken from inside a short sentence, and you should practise words inside phrases too.
• Record yourself and compare with the audio on the word page. Play the female and the male voice: the shapes are the same, even though the pitch is not.
• Listen for minimal pairs, words that differ only in tone, such as 买 mǎi to buy and 卖 mài to sell, or 汤 tāng soup and 糖 táng sugar.

Questions learners ask

How many tones does Mandarin have? Four, plus the neutral tone. Some books count the neutral tone and say five. Cantonese, a different Chinese language, has six or more.

Do I really need tones if people understand from context? In a full sentence, context helps a lot, and native speakers will often understand a wrong tone. With short phrases, names and single words it often fails, and wrong tones make listening tiring for the other person. Learning them from the start costs much less than fixing them later.

Why does a word sound different in a sentence? Tones change in some combinations (third tones, 一 and 不), the neutral tone takes its pitch from the tone before it, and the overall pitch of a sentence rises and falls. The word’s own shape stays recognisable. Tone changes covers the rules.

Which tone is the hardest? For most English speakers, the third tone (because of the textbook dip) and telling the second from the third. Practising the half third tone as simply “low” usually solves both.