Mandarin, like most Chinese dialects, is a tonal language. This means that tones, just like consonants and vowels, are used to distinguish words from each other. Many foreigners have difficulties in mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone.
Mandarin, like most Chinese dialects, is a tonal language. This means that tones, just like consonants and vowels, are used to distinguish words from each other. Many foreigners have difficulties in mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone; the following are the four tones of standard mandarin.
The first tone, or high-level tone (陰平/阴平 yīnpíng, literal meaning: yin-level): Sounds spoken out in this tone is steady high, as if it were being sung instead of spoken.
The second tone, or rising tone (陽平/阳平 yángpíng, literal meaning: yang-level), is a sound that rises from mid-level tone to high (e.g., What?!)
The third tone, or low-falling-raising, (上聲/上声 shǎngshēng or shàngshēng, literal meaning: "up tone"). Sounds spoken out in this tone has a mid-low to low descent; it just like at the end of a sentence or before a pause, the sound is then followed by a rising pitch.
The fourth tone, which also means falling tone (去聲/去声 qùshēng, literal meaning: "away tone"). This tone features a sharp downward accent ("dipping") from high to low, and is a shorter tone, similar to the situation when speaking commands. (e.g., Stop!)
The neutral tone, which is also called the fifth tone or zeroth tone (in Chinese: 輕聲/轻声 qīng shēng, literal meaning: "light tone"). The neutral tone is particularly difficult for non-native speakers to master correctly because of its uncharacteristically large number of allotone contours: the level of its pitch depends almost entirely on the tone carried by the syllable preceding it. The situation is further complicated by the amount of dialectal variation associated with it; in some regions, notably Taiwan, neutral tone is relatively uncommon.
Most Romanization represents the tones as diacritics on the vowels (e.g., Pinyin, MPS II and Tongyong Pinyin). Zhuyin uses diacritics as well. Others, like Wade-Giles, use superscript numbers at the end of each syllable. The tone marks and numbers are rarely used outside of textbooks.
When the shape of the 3rd tone happened before the first tone, second tone and forth tone, the pronunciation will be vary with context according to the rules of tone sandhi. The most prominent phenomenon of this kind is when there are two third tones in immediate sequence, in which case the first of them changes to a rising tone.