The four tones and the neutral tone

Say ma with a level, rising, dipping or falling pitch and you get four different words: mother, hemp, horse and scold.

In English, pitch changes the mood of a sentence. A rising yes? is a question and a falling yes. is an answer, but the word stays the same. In Mandarin the pitch of each syllable belongs to the word itself. The official 1958 pinyin scheme gives a famous example: 妈 mā (mother), 麻 má (hemp), 马 mǎ (horse) and 骂 mà (to scold) share the same letters and differ only in pitch. A fifth syllable, 吗 ma, is the little word that turns a sentence into a yes or no question, and it has no tone of its own. Getting the tone wrong is like saying the wrong vowel in English: people may still guess what you mean from context, but you have said a different word.

A five-step scale for pitch

In 1930 the linguist Chao Yuen Ren drew a ruler for tones that teachers still use. Divide your comfortable speaking range into five steps, 1 at the bottom and 5 at the top, and write each tone as the steps it passes through. The first tone is 55: it starts high and stays high. The second tone is 35: it starts in the middle and rises to the top. The third tone is 214: it starts low, sinks to the bottom and comes back up. The fourth tone is 51: it starts at the top and drops to the bottom. The numbers are relative. A child and a deep-voiced man say the same tones in different ranges, and what counts is the shape inside your own voice.

Hearing each tone

The first tone is the one English speakers drop most often, because a long flat pitch sounds odd in English. Pitch it a little higher than your normal voice and hold it steady, as if you were singing one note. The second tone rises like the English question what? Many learners start it too low, so begin from the middle of your voice. The fourth tone falls quickly, like a firm No! or the way you say Stop! to a dog. It is short and clipped compared with the others.

The third tone needs the most attention. Said alone, as in a dictionary recording, it dips and comes back up. In running speech, though, speakers often say only the low part and skip the rise, especially when another syllable follows. So aim low first. Let your voice sink almost to a creak, and add the rise only when the word comes at the end of a phrase. Unit 5 explains what happens when two third tones meet.

The neutral tone

Some syllables have no tone of their own. They are short and light, and their pitch depends on the syllable before them: after a first tone the neutral syllable sits a little lower, and after a third tone it often sounds slightly higher. The pinyin scheme leaves them unmarked, so ma with no mark is the neutral tone. You meet the neutral tone in question words like 吗 ma, in the second half of many family words such as 妈妈 māma (mum) and 爸爸 bàba (dad), and in grammar words like 的 de. Chinese sometimes calls it the light tone, 轻声 qīngshēng.