Chinese tones: what they are and a drill to fix them in memory
Mandarin has four tones and a neutral one, and they are not decoration: 八 bā is “eight”, 把 bǎ is a grammatical marker, 爸 bà is “dad”. One syllable, three unrelated words, separated only by pitch.
The drill below shows a character and asks which tone it takes. It runs over 509 characters from the HSK syllabus, and 331 of them share a syllable with something else — after each answer you see what that syllable means in the other tones.
The drill
影
picture
The five tones
- 1
- first
- high and level
- 2
- second
- rising, as if asking a question
- 3
- third
- dipping then rising — in running speech usually just the dip
- 4
- fourth
- falling sharply, as if giving an order
- —
- neutral
- no tone, short and light
The third tone is the one to watch. Textbooks draw it as a full dip and rise, but in running speech it is usually just the dip — the rise appears only when the syllable stands alone or at the end of a phrase.
What this drill is and is not
It trains memory for the tone of a character. That is a real and useful thing — a word learned without its tone is learned wrong, and fixing it later is harder than getting it right now.
It is not ear training. Hearing the difference between a second and a third tone in someone else’s speech is a separate skill and needs audio, which this site does not have yet. Rather than fake it with speech synthesis — which on most Windows and Linux machines silently has no Chinese voice at all — the page says what it does not do.
Tones and readings come from the same data as the rest of the English side: characters of the HSK syllabus with readings from CC-CEDICT. Nothing here was typed in by hand, so nothing here can disagree with the character pages.
Frequently asked
- How many tones does Mandarin have?
- Four, plus a neutral one that is often counted separately and often not. The neutral is not a fifth pitch: it is a syllable said short and light, with its pitch taken from whatever came before.
- Does the tone really change the meaning?
- Yes, and not subtly. 八 bā is “eight”, 把 bǎ is a grammatical marker, 爸 bà is “dad”. Same syllable, three unrelated words. Tone is part of the word in the same way a vowel is.
- Is this a listening exercise?
- No, and the title says so. This drill asks which tone a character is read with — memory, not hearing. Training your ear needs audio, which this site does not have yet; speech synthesis would silently have no Chinese voice on most machines.
- Why are characters like 长 and 都 missing from the drill?
- Because they have more than one reading — cháng and zhǎng, dōu and dū — so “which tone is this character” has no single right answer. All 144 such characters were left out rather than asked about unfairly.