Tone pronunciation

The tone (声调 shēngdiào, literally “sound” 声 + “modulation” 调 ⟶ “modulation of the sound”) is the melodic pitch that comes with every syllable of Chinese. It is not an ornament: the tone is part of the word, just as much as a consonant is.

Four characters show it better than a long explanation. 妈 mā, 麻 má, 马 mǎ and 骂 mà are all pronounced “ma”. Only the intonation separates them, and that is enough to move from “mother” to “hemp”, then to “horse”, then to “to swear at”. An English speaker whose voice rises at the end of a sentence, out of the reflex for questions, often says something other than what they mean.

Method

Choose a syllable by clicking its card, below. Listen to the Chinese speaker, then record yourself with the card on the right: the browser will ask permission to use the microphone, and the recording stops on its own after three seconds.

Then click “Overlay and analyse”. The two pitch curves are laid one over the other, brought to the same length, and you see at a glance where yours departs from the model.

Careful: the exercise judges intonation only, that is, the tone of the syllable. It says nothing about the sound itself (the “ma”). And the speaker’s tone is deliberately exaggerated: it is a training model, not a conversation.

Over to you.

Automatic detection is not infallible. On a very deep voice, a noisy recording or a syllable attacked too softly, the analysis hesitates between the 2nd and the 3rd tone (that pair is the hardest to tell apart, for the machine as for the ear). When it does get it wrong, though, the curve does not lie: look at the drawing rather than at the percentage. If tone marks and pinyin are not familiar to you, they are set out in detail on the The pinyin page.

4TONES

The 4TONES app runs the same exercise on your phone, with far more material: 40 syllables for the tones on their own, 25 words and set phrases for tone combinations, and full sentences to come. Male voice and female voice.

Google Play QR code to install 4TONES from Google Play