It’s Never Too Late to Learn Chinese Tones. Here’s How

A few years ago, I realised that if I wanted to reach a decent level of spoken Mandarin I would need to work on my tones. As is commonplace, I was shielded from this reality by polite friends and tutors who are used to hearing foreigners speak Chinese with poor tones and have come to expect it. They always told me what I wanted to hear: “Your tones are fine, stop worrying about it!”

Then, one day a friend with a slightly more direct communication style than average delivered the crushing truth. My Mandarin sounded classically foreign, she told me, to the extent it was often hard to understand what I was saying. I reacted defensively but deep down I knew she was right.

By that point I’d been learning Chinese for four years and, like many foreigners, had a pretty relaxed attitude to tones. I had learned the basics; I knew there were four of them plus a neutral one and I’d made half-hearted attempts to listen out for them. But I’d never given them focused attention or sought proper feedback from a tutor. I assumed I’d be able to pick them up naturally through lots of listening but the results were worse than I imagined.

Shortly before I decided to work on my tones I recorded a conversation in Mandarin with my language exchange partner. The recording took the form of a mock interview where he pretended to be a YouTube host asking me how I had learned Mandarin. I had no intention of ever publishing it but wanted to hear what I sounded like as I hadn’t recorded myself speaking Chinese before.

When I listened to the recording I could hear my speech was off but couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. Listening back, it is clear there are a large number of glaring tone errors (as well as awkward structure and word usage) which make it cringing to listen to. After hundreds of hours of listening input and conversations with native speakers, my Chinese wasn’t completely atonal but each sentence I uttered would usually contain at least one glaring error, often several.

For comparison, 6 months later I recorded myself speaking with my tutor to document my progress from working on my tones every day:

Both recordings were first takes and unscripted. I was pleased with my progress. within a relatively short period of daily practice, I’d gone from regularly butchering tones to becoming comfortable talking about familiar topics with largely correct tones.

One of my main motivations for writing this blog is the fact that there is relatively little advice for people in the same boat as I was: the large proportion of intermediate to advanced learners whose tones are as bad or worse than mine were. Most advice on tones is instead aimed at beginners and warns that students who didn’t take tones seriously from the start have committed an irredeemable sin.

The longer I went without addressing my tone issues the longer I felt there was no point in trying to do so since my bad habits were surely too deeply ingrained. I began to self-identify as a victim of what every serious language learner fears most: fossilisation.

Fortunately, this was nonsense. Sure, focusing on tones at the start is the best option and will cause the least pain in the long run. But it’s equally true that anybody can learn tones at any point regardless of their level or how long they’ve been learning.

So how have I gone about correcting my wayward tones? My approach involves five main components:

The Roadmap to Improving Tones

1. Drilling Tones in Isolation & pairs

The first thing I did was make sure I was able to consistently hear and produce the tones correctly in isolation. Through practicing the four tones with native speakers I identified I had an issue with the third tone. The third tone is often mistaught as a falling and rising tone when in fact, as the video in this link shows, in most cases it’s pronounced as a low tone.

Once I had ironed out these issues I familiarised myself with the 20-tone pair combinations. Chinese vocabulary usually consists of two characters so drilling tone pairs is more important than producing tones in isolation. Unfortunately, many Chinese tutors fail to teach this crucial aspect of tone acquisition. I drilled these pairs daily with a native speaker to correct my mistakes until producing them accurately felt easy. We cover exactly how to do this in our Peak Mandarin Tones Masterclass.

2. Vocabulary Memorisation

Using the flashcard feature on the dictionary app Pleco I began testing my memory of tones for known vocabulary. It turned out my lax attitude had led to a significant minority of vocabulary being mislearned or misremembered. However, after drilling flashcards daily for several weeks I was able to accurately recall the vast majority of the tones for my active vocabulary.

Through this daily flashcard drilling, I also built a mental habit of categorising each vocabulary item into one of the 20-tone pair combinations. Using this technique to memorise tones for new vocabulary was tough at first but after a few weeks, I could recall the tones for 80-90% of HSK6. To build and maintain new vocabulary I used the space repetition software Hack Chinese. After a few months, I no longer found memorising tones harder than other elements of pronunciation, such as initials and finals.

3. Speaking Practice & Correction

Alongside the previous two steps, I began searching for a tutor on Italki who could correct me when speaking at a natural pace. After trying out half a dozen I settled on one – an untrained community tutor who, refreshingly, did not seem obsessed with exam preparation and was willing to adapt her lessons to my needs. She was also unafraid to correct my mistakes.

When we first started working together, her corrections were overwhelming in number. The most frequent mistakes involved common combinations of two or more third tones, for example, “我也想…” (when two or more third tones are placed together all but the final one becomes second tone). These phrases were also the hardest to correct because I had developed bad habits from saying them incorrectly so many times over the years. However, through persistent correction, I was able to replace them with new habits. Six months later most of my sentences didn’t contain tone errors.

4. Focussed Reading and Listening

Alongside the steps above, I made sure I paid closer attention to tones when reading and listening to Chinese. I would either read material aloud or make sure I was subvocalising the tones correctly for each tone pair. If I encountered a word which I didn’t know the tone pair for I would look it up and try to memorise it. Doing this significantly slowed down my reading at first but over time I regained and even surpassed my previous speed.

Directing my attention to tones when listening to videos and podcasts was also crucial. I made an effort to distinguish between tones that can sound similar to the untrained ear. For example, fourth tone can sometimes sound like first tone and third tone can sound like second tone. Changing the YouTube speed setting to slow and listening repeatedly helped me redress these tonal misperceptions and refine my ear. Consequently, I developed the instinct to hear when my own tones are off and autocorrect them. This is arguably the most valuable skill to develop when acquiring tones.

5. Imitation

The better I got at producing tones correctly the more I benefited from imitation techniques. I used a variety of methods. One method included pulling out phrases from TV dramas or YouTube videos and imitating them. I then collected the sentences in a phrase bank to review with my tutor or Chinese friends. They would read the phrase out loud with natural intonation and I’d try to copy them. They’d then give me feedback and correct any errors until my imitation was near-native.

Another technique used is to ‘echo’ Chinese speakers while listening to podcasts. Each time I listen to a phrase, I pause the audio, wait a couple of seconds, and imitate it. This technique works best with highly comprehensible material as you can focus on pronouncing the sounds correctly rather than trying to understand the meaning. It’s also best to select material that is chatty and contains useful colloquial phrases rather than formal language.

Imitation is crucial because it not only trains us to pronounce tones correctly but to do so in a way that sounds natural rather than robotic. You should try and put yourself in situations where you can use the language with native speakers as often as possible, such as our immersive Mandarin Retreats. After a while, you will find that you start to mimic their style and accent without even realising you’re doing it!

These are some of the main techniques I used to reach a high level of tonal accuracy. In my free eBook, Lessons from a Chinese Learning Phenomenon I go in-depth on exactly what I did to become fluent in spoken Mandarin, after struggling for years.

Conclusion

Foreign speakers of Chinese have such a bad reputation when it comes to tones that a widespread internet slang term has emerged to parody us. The term 歪果仁 is pronounced like 外国人 (meaning foreigner) but with the wrong tones.

Over the years I’ve heard several Chinese people express the view that besides 大山 – a Canadian who became famous for performing traditional 相声 comedic dialogues on Chinese TV – no foreigner can master tones. This is nonsense, but, understandably, people believe it given the general prevalence of bad tones.

There are several reasons why we neglect working on tones. Two of the most common ones are: 1) learners who haven’t learned tones properly are unaware their tones are bad and 2) learners know their tones are bad but have given up hope they can do anything about it as they’ve been led to believe it’s impossibly difficult.

Some people aren’t sure whether their tones are good or not. If that describes you, the likelihood is you’re probably in category one. Unless you can hear for yourself when your tones or those of other people are off you will have little chance of producing them correctly when speaking.

Whichever category you are in, I hope this blog can provide you with a roadmap to get started improving your tones. Doing so will seem challenging at first and requires significant patience but achieving noticeable results within a reasonable time frame is possible and worth the effort.

Need help with your tones?

If you’re studying Mandarin and are struggling with your speaking skills, our Tones Masterclass offers a step-by-step online program to complete in your own time, teaching you everything you need to know about the specific techniques you need to train yourself to speak Chinese with accurate, natural-sounding tones.

We’ve based it on exactly what we did to nail tones ourselves, as well as input from Professor Karen Chung of National Taiwan University – one of the world’s leading phoneticists and foreign Chinese speakers.

Get access to your Masterclass here.