Hanyu Pinyin - Part 3 - The 4 Tones

Moving forward, once you know how to spell the combination of phonics, then you have to get to know and master the 4 tones known in Mandarin.

Tone is known as 声调 ( shēngdiào ) in Chinese. There are 4 tones in Chinese and they are symbolized by the 4 small lines on top of one of the vowels.

To avoid confusion between the second and fourth sound (slash and backslash look alike), you can try to link the four lines to form letter "M" with the tail in front. If you can't form an M with the 4 lines, you have definitely written the second and fourth lines wrongly.

Each line represents how a word sounds.

The first line is flat, thus the sound produced by word with the first tone is flat, just like when a dentist ask you to open your mouth and say "ahhhh".

The second line has to be written from the left bottom to the right top (going up), because the sounds that are produced by words with second tone is going up.

The third line looks like letter 'v'. I always relate this to the sound of burping (short one!).

The fourth line has to be written from the left top to the right bottom (going down), because the sound it produces would be like the "aw!" sound that you make when a friend hit you, high pitch to low pitch.

Please listen to the following:

Listen to the second sound, I purposely drag it longer so that it is clear how the sounds go from lower to higher pitch. However, when we speak we normally do not drag the sound.

Let see how we use it in the spelling:

More sample spelling...

You should first work on perfecting the 4 tones for the 6 individual vowels.

āáǎà

ōóǒò

ēéěè

īíǐì

ūúǔù

ǖǘǚǜ

Then, you can start spelling a word that consists of 1 consonant + 1 vowel. You can try the following combination of phonics that form a word:

nā   ná   nǎ  nà

bō   bó   bǒ  bò

dē   dé   dě  dè

qī   qí   qǐ  qi

kū   kú   kǔ  kù

xǖ   xǘ   xǚ  xǜ

Match your answer with the spelling on this page

Tips and Trick!

Pronouncing the 3rd tone can be a bit tricky. Personally I think changing it a little works just fine. You can try to imitate the sound that you make when you burp (short one!) Listen to the (burping) sound in the video below and how we use it to pronounce actual words.

We are going to finish up pinyin, in my next post. As mentioned, pinyin will help you to read the translated English word in Pleco or any other dictionaries and maybe read books that come with pinyin (most beginner books do have pinyin). Also, once you know how to read/pronounce certain words or when you hear someone say something and able to spell the pinyin out, it will enable you to look up the meaning of the words in Pleco much faster. All in all, pinyin is the basic tool that will allow you to explore more about the language yourself.

Try the following, write down the pinyin and the tone of the word that you hear. Answer will be revealed in the next post.

Feel free to comment or ask questions!

Happy Spelling,

Linda Tan

P.S. I have not found a way to make the video work on hand gadget (on my iPhone), so the videos above can only be viewed on a desktop or laptop.
For first timer, please go back to the very first post to start learning Mandarin. Here it is. It is to get to know what you need along the way.