The Four Tones and the Neutral Tone

Chinese is a tonal language, which means the pitch of your voice changes a word's meaning. Same syllable, different tone, different word. The classic example is ma:

• mā (mom)
• má (hemp)
• mǎ (horse)
• mà (to scold)

Say the wrong tone and you've said the wrong word, so tones aren't optional decoration. They're part of how a word is spelled and pronounced.

The four tones

Think of your voice moving across a range from low to high. Each tone is a different shape of movement.

First tone (ā) — high and flat. You hold a steady, high pitch, like you're singing one note. The mark is a flat line: mā.

Second tone (á) — rising. Your voice goes up, like the way English rises at the end of a question ("me?"). The mark points up: má.

Third tone (ǎ) — dipping. Your voice drops down low, then comes back up a little. The mark shows that dip and rise: mǎ. In practice, when a third tone isn't the last syllable, people mostly just say the low part and skip the rise.

Fourth tone (à) — falling. A sharp drop from high to low, like a firm command ("No!"). The mark points down: mà.

A good way to feel them: first tone is steady, second asks, third sinks, fourth snaps.

Where the tone mark goes

The mark sits over the main vowel. If there's only one vowel, that's easy. If there are several, the order of priority is a, o, e first, then i, u. So in hǎo the mark goes on the a, and in xièxie it's on the e.

One small spelling note: when i takes a tone mark, the dot disappears. So it's nǐ, not nǐ with a dot on top.

The neutral tone

Some syllables have no tone at all. They're said quickly and lightly, with whatever pitch is easy after the syllable before. These are the neutral tone, and they're written with no mark.

You'll see them in a few common spots:

• The second half of a doubled word: māma (mom), bàba (dad)
• Grammar particles like 吗 ma, 了 le, 的 de, 吧 ba
• The plural marker 们 men, as in 我们 wǒmen (we)

The neutral tone isn't a fifth tone with its own shape. It's more like "no tone, just say it light and quick." How high or low it lands depends on the tone right before it, so you don't have to aim for a target. Just relax it.

A couple of things worth knowing early

Tones can feel strange at first because English uses pitch for emotion, not for meaning. In Chinese, the pitch belongs to the word itself. You still get to show emotion, it just rides on top of the tones.

Also, tones do shift in real speech when they bump into each other. The most famous case is two third tones in a row, where the first one turns into a second tone (so nǐ hǎo is actually said ní hǎo). That's a separate topic, covered in the article on tone changes, so don't worry about it yet. For now, just learn each word's tone as part of the word, the same way you learn its spelling.