Your Ultimate Guide to Practicing the Tones of the Chinese Language

The tones of the Chinese language are often considered to be extremely difficult for non-native speakers to grasp. In this post I explain how I learned to speak fluent Mandarin with accurate Chinese tones and break down how you can practice tones using the same methods in six easy steps.

Table of Contents

1. What is a Mandarin Tone?
2. How I Discovered My Tones Were Bad
3. Recordings Before and After I Practiced Chinese Tones
4. Why Anyone Can Fix Their Bad Chinese Tones
5. The 6-Step Guide to Practice Chinese Tones
   1. Step 1. Practice Chinese Tones in Isolation
   2. Step 2. Practice Chinese Tone Pairs
   3. Step 3. Vocabulary Memorisation
   4. Step 4. Practice Chinese Tones When Speaking
   5. Step 5. Practice Chinese Tones Through Reading and Listening
   6. Step 6. Imitation Tones Practice
6. Conclusion
7. Is Communicating Clearly in Mandarin Important to You?

What is a Mandarin Tone?

Chinese, tones are pitch variations that change the meaning of a word. Mandarin has for main tones and a neutral tone and each one has a unique pitch contour.

Unlike in English, where pitch contours are mostly used for emphasis or emotion, in Mandarin using the wrong tone can completely change the meaning of a word.

Since Mandarin has many words with the same pronunciation but different tones, using the wrong tone can lead to confusion. For example, the syllable ‘ma’ can have more than four different meanings depending on which tone it is pronounced with.

How I Discovered My Tones Were Bad

The tones of the Chinese language are notoriously challenging for non-native speakers to grasp. As a learner, I put off focusing on practising Chinese tones for the first few years. Then, around four years into my learning journey, I realised that if I wanted to reach a decent level of spoken Mandarin I would need to practice tones.

As is commonplace, I had been 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 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 practised tones in a focused way 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.

Recordings Before and After I Practiced Chinese Tones

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 I 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 I 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, even if it took a lot of mental energy to do so.

After a few more months of speaking regularly, I was able to get to a point where I could speak at a natural pace with accurate tones, without having to think about them.

Why Anyone Can Fix Their Bad Chinese 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 may be the best option and cause the least pain in the long run. But it’s equally true that anybody can master tones at any point regardless of their level or how long they’ve been learning.

The 6-Step Guide to Practice Chinese Tones

So how did I go about practicing my wayward tones? My approach involved the six steps below which you can put into practice yourself.

Before I go on, I should mention that if you want to go deeper into how to practice Chinese tones, you can subscribe to my Tones Mechanic newsletter for free. In the newsletter, I teach you the exact steps I used (and which anyone can use) to go from mediocre tones to delivering public speeches and podcasts in accurate, confident and natural Mandarin.

When you subscribe, you’ll also get free access to a complete Tones Masterclass video course packed with step-by-step lessons and dozens of native audio files. Fill out the form below to get started on your journey to tones mastery!

Step 1. Practice Chinese Tones in Isolation

The first thing I did was make sure I was able to consistently hear and produce the tones correctly in isolation. Mandarin has four main tones plus a neutral tone (see the chart above and recordings below).

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, in most cases, it’s pronounced as a low tone.

First tone: High and flat.

Second Tone: Rising

Third Tone: Low

Fourth Tone: High to Low Exclamation

Step 2. Practice Chinese Tone Pairs

Once I had ironed out these issues I familiarised myself with the 20-tone pair combinations. Chinese vocabulary usually consists of two characters so once you’ve mastered pronouncing individual syllables, you need to move on to tone pairs. Unfortunately, many Chinese tutors fail to teach this crucial aspect of tone acquisition. I drilled the pairs in the chart below daily with a native speaker to correct my mistakes until producing them accurately felt easy.

Step 3. 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.

Step 4. Practice Chinese Tones When Speaking

Alongside the previous two steps, I began searching for a tutor who could correct me when speaking at a natural pace. After trying out half a dozen I settled on one – an unqualified tutor who taught Chinese as a hobby and, refreshingly, did not seem obsessed with exam preparation.

Unlike the other tutors I’d come across, she was willing to adapt her lessons to my needs. She was also unafraid to correct my mistakes when practising tones.

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 become the 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.

Step 5. Practice Chinese Tones Through 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 Chinese podcasts was also crucial.

I made an effort to distinguish between tones that can sound similar to the untrained ear. For example, the fourth tone can sometimes sound like first tone and third tone can sound like the 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.

Step 6. Imitation Tones Practice

The better I got at producing tones correctly the more I benefited from imitation techniques. 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.

I used a variety of methods. One method included pulling out phrases from TV dramas or YouTube videos and imitating them. This is a process known as Sentence Mining. I 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. Then, They’d give me feedback and correct any errors until my imitation was near-native. You can listen to the clip below of me mimicking my tutor at the time.

Another technique I used is The Echo Method, which 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 for the native voice to echo in my head, before imitating 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.

I got this idea from Professor Karen Chung, an academic linguist from the US who speaks flawless Chinese and explained how to use her Echo method when I interviewed her for my podcast (below).

Conclusion

Foreign learners have such a bad reputation when it comes to the tones of the Chinese language 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 (Da Shan) – a Canadian who became famous for performing traditional 相声 comedic dialogues on Chinese TV – no foreigner can master the tones of Chinese. 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.