Chinese Tones
April 8th, 2006 by MarkThis my reply to the second part of Mike’s email from this morning. He was asking if people could tell the tones of Chinese characters from their written form.
I assume Mandarin doesn’t have this issue (of not being able to tell how syllables are inflected) since each syllable has (one of 5?) inflections: hook, straight, etc. Is that correct?
Unfortunately, there’s nothing in the orthography of a Chinese character that tells you how to pronounce it. Each character’s tones must be memorized through exposure, mnemonics, or brute force. Making a horrible situation worse, several characters have different pronunciaitons and/or tones depending on what word they are in. Those characters are called pòyīnzì.
| Tone | Description | Pitch Contour |
| 1st tone | high even | 5-5 |
| 2rd tone | rising | 3-5 |
| 3rd tone | hook | 2-1-4 |
| 4th tone | falling | 5-1 |
Once you know what tone each character is, you have to learn a few rules for combining tones. Sometimes tones change based on other tones in nearby syllables. This is called tone sandhi The most common one is when two third tones are next to each other. Normally, third tone words have a “hook” tone that starts at a low pitch, dips down, and then rises again (2-1-4). However, when there are two third tones (2-1-4) together, the first one becomes a second tone (3-5) + (2-1-4). Another very common transformation is when a third tone is followed by a second tone, the rising part of the third tone gets “cropped” (2-1) and the two tones together are (2-1) + (3-5). There are also some words like 不, the word for “no”, which change tones based on nearby words. Normally 不 is fourth tone, but if it’s followed by a fourth tone it becomes second tone. The number for one, 一, is first tone when it’s alone, second when followed by a fourth tone, or fourth tone when followed by any other tone. It’s really not as bad as it sounds, but it definitely confuses some lower level students. The shortened third tones are especially easy for beginners to get mixed up.
| Combination | Original Pitches | Combined Pitches |
| 3rd tone + 3rd tone | 2-1-4, 2-1-4 | 3-5, 2-1-4 |
| 3rd tone + 2nd tone | 2-1-4, 3-5 | 2-1, 3-5 |
| 不 + 4th tone | 5-1, 5-1 | 3-5, 5-1 |
| 一 + 4th tone | 5-5, 5-1 | 3-5, 5-1 |
| 一 + any other tone | 5-5, * | 5-1, * |
In Taiwan, it’s especially difficult to tell, since there are many words that most people pronounce differently from what’s in most (local) textbooks. In addition to the differences between which tones Taiwanese people use for words and which tones Taiwanese dictionaries use for tones, there are many words that set the local variant of Mandarin, or Taiwan Guóyŭ, apart from the standard dialect. I’m sure that’s going to mess me up big time if I ever have to use Chinese outside of Taiwan. Despite all of the problems though, at the end of the day I’m still thankful… thankful that I’m not learning Cantonese.
Links: John recently wrote a similar post. The comments on get into a lot more details than I did. Wikipedia also has a good article on this.
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April 9th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
Mark-san,
The tone changes of “一” and “不” are still troublesome for me. I can not think of any clear necessities to do so. But when there are two third tones together, changing the former third tone into second tone is very helpful for pronouncing the word naturally.
By the way, I am going back to Japan tomorrow and coming back to China at the end of April. I am afraid that I will not be able to find enough time to visit your blog and post comments from Japan in spite of securing much time for drinking. Good bye for now.
April 10th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
I don’t think the explanation of the third tone is right. It goes down normally (2-1) and when it’s third tone-third tone, then it goes up (1-4), which most Chinese teachers simplify to second tone (3-5), but that’s where 2-1-4 comes from.
April 10th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
What I wrote above was correct. Third tones normally have a (2-1-4) pitch contour. When followed by a second tone, a third tone becomes shortened to (2-1). If two third tones are together, the first third tone becomes a second tone. For more information, see the Wikipedia article that I linked to in the main post.
From the comments you made earlier, under the name “On ABCs”, I’m guessing you’re a Taiwanese-American. I don’t know how much Mandarin you speak, but one thing you may not be aware of is that Minnanhua (AKA “Taiwanese”) has a low falling tone. In Taiwan, most people use that tone instead of the Mandarin third tone, even when speaking Mandarin. As a result, many Taiwanese people struggle with third tones from standard Mandarin. Even one of my old Chinese tutors continually got the 3rd tones in the tone practice part of the Far East Everyday Chinese CDs confused with second tones. It may be that most of the Mandarin you’ve heard has been heavily influenced by Minnanhua.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Don’t guess. No, I don’t speak Taiwanese, though I do know about the funny time-capsule phenemonon of Taiwanese-Americans speaking Taiwanese and not Mandarin, and I think it’s both interesting and maybe a little sad when they come back and find they can’t really use Taiwanese.
It appears that on both sides of the strait, third tone in its full glory is only pronounced 2-1-4 if it’s the last syllable of a sentence. Now if you’re worried you don’t sound like you’re from Beijing, they are more likely to shift a lot of terminal third tones to soft tone (not because it’s the end of a sentence but just because they do anywhere…) than they are to pronounce the 2-1-4.
You seem to think that calling Taiwanese a language is wrong. It’s hard to say. One, Taiwanese vocabulary is a lot different from Minnan spoken in Fujian because of oh say, a few hundred years, the influence of Japanese colonization, and aboriginals.
Taiwanese also has been heavily influenced by Mandarin partially because there’s been a conscious effort to use Taiwanese in areas where it was not originally used–news, politics, etc. This results in a lot of Mandarin-Taiwanese, just like you have Taiwanese-Mandarin.
From the diversity of Taiwanese even just on Taiwan, with only recently the southern dialect gaining prominence and the beginnings of a unified Taiwanese, I’m not so sure you want to call these languages the same language.
The last feature I think should be media and its role in unifying a language–in China, they don’t allow local languages on TV, though they tolerate it on the radio. Taiwan is the opposite. It’s all over the place, TV, radio, public transit, etc. There’s also been a lot of literature writing down some Taiwanese (such as li3yu3), though very, very few people read Taiwanese. These are all things that are unifying Taiwanese on Taiwan and notice how it has no effect on Minnanhua speakers in China.
I agree it’s not like French and English different, but it’s not so simple to say it’s Minnanhua. With effort, someone speaking Taiwanese could get your point across to someone speaking Minnanhua, but it does take effort.
Taiwanese, without the quotes, for sure, exists. What you want to classify it as is an open question, but to just dismissively toss it in with a speaker community that it doesn’t have much contact with is surely at least a little strange.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Oh, if you still remember what the parts of the book that your tutor got confused, I’d be curious, whether you mean the words or if you want to post the clip. What you’re saying about your tutor really doesn’t match up. If third tone is pronounced 2-1 most of the time as you say (I only disagree that it only happens on Taiwan), then why would it be confused with second tone, which is 3-5. They sound completely different…
April 10th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
I think you may have misunderstood. I did not say that the third tone is pronounced (2-1) most of the time. I said that it is normally pronounced (2-1-4), and that sometimes it’s shortened to (2-1), such as when followed by a second tone.
My tutor had problems with every tone exercise in the book that I showed her, including the one in part A of lesson one in the workbook. It’s on page 1. The drill was to listen to the CD and write tone marks above 20 words. The reason she was confused is because she always shortens her 3rd tones into low-falling tones. As a result, when she heard the (1-4) part of a (2-1-4) pitch contour, it sounded a lot like (3-5) to her. That’s what happened, and I’m sorry if you don’t feel it matches up.
April 10th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
I didn’t misunderstand. The actual practice, in both China and Taiwan, is to pronounce the third tone 2-1. Only when it is the very last tone, more likely in China than in Taiwan, will you hear it as 2-1-4, but only if it isn’t a Beijing speaker who turned the third tone in to no tone/fifth tone, which is very common for the second syllable of two syllable words in Beijing’s current version of Mandarin. Also, in both Taiwan and China, when it is followed by another third tone, then it changes from third-third tone to second tone-third tone.
I don’t have the book :-). I meant if you had a sample you wanted to type out or a clip from the CD (I thought you meant your tutor listened off of something and couldn’t tell).
April 10th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
I guess posting a short clip falls under fair use, especially in Taiwan, heh, heh, heh. I’ll see what I can do.
April 11th, 2006 at 12:03 am
Okay, I put that one exercise up here. If you don’t have an .ogg player, I suggest winamp. My tutor had problems with 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 17.
BTW, the textbook&CD are published in Taiwan.
April 18th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Is Ogg better compression?
Sorry for taking awhile to get back. I don’t know why your tutor had problems identifying the tone. The pronounciations of second and third tone are very, very different in this exercise. Did your tutor actually pronounce it incorrectly though? I’m guessing you weren’t able to tell at the time, but I think that would be a different kind of problem.
The prounciation on the tape is also in the way I described, third tone not going up.
April 18th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
Better than…? MP3? In the vast majority of cases yet. But the biggest plus is that it has zero patent encumberance. It can be used in any open-source stuff.
The exercise was about listening to the words and writing the tone marks. I did every single one correctly. My tutor marked several of them wrong, but I didn’t believe her. So, I bought the instructor’s book for her and found that it was actually she who was wrong in each of those cases.
I’ve long since lost contact with that tutor, but since seeing your previous comments on this thread, I’ve had several other Taiwanese people listen to the CD, and only about 1/3 can correctly identify the 3rd tones. After being told they’re getting them wrong, some of them start incorrectly guessing that 2nd tones are 3rd tones. Every last one has blamed it on the “mainlander” pronunciation. If you have any mainland friends from the south, I’d love to know if it’s hard for them, too, or not.
Interestingly, many are also unable to distinguish “en” and “eng” sounds, but that’s the topic of a different post.
April 19th, 2006 at 2:22 am
On dialects in China… Shanghainese is a completely, completely different animal and it’s in the south. It has something like high and low, not up and down. Taiwanese and Cantonese… they are both much more reflective of Middle Chinese than Mandarin and northeast languages are. There are eight tones in both Minnanyu and Cantonese. They now use 7 (I believe one has been lost fairly recently in terms of centuries). Mandarin on the other hand has lost 4. There is no tone in Mandarin that is not in Taiwanese, but the reverse is not true.
My take is there’s national Mandarin in China, there’s Beijing Mandarin, and in Taiwan there’s Taiwan Mandarin, and then there’s Taiwan Mandarin that’s really something like Taiwanese Mandarin with sound shifts I’ve read about and I’ve reproduced below. Beijing Mandarin does a lot of weird shit that I think is understandable in China, but not done by people outside of the northeast. It diverges from dictionary pronounciations (watch Chinese political figures give speaks and listen to their tones carefully). This is not an issue of Taiwan versus China but Beijing diverging from China Chinese. You can try to learn the Beijing version if you want, but it’s not necessary for being understood and in actuality it’s not “standard” even though everyone talks about it as if it is.
Taiwan Mandarin shifts:
The sounds that get mixed up a lot are the h and the r.
z vs zh
c vs ch
s vs sh
r goes to l a lot.
if it’s a uo cluster it often shifts to o.
April 19th, 2006 at 4:54 am
That’s a pretty good summary of Taiwan Guoyuizatoin. One thing I’d add to it is:
eng -> en
ing -> in
I doubt those texts book CDs use any Beijinghua, since they’re made in Taiwan. Why do you figure so many Taiwanese people have troubles with the third tones? The reason I asked about southerners is that while many languages are spoken in the south, many southerners tend to exhibit the same pronunciation traits you listed above.
Are you sure about that? According to several sources I’ve seen, these are the seven Taiwanese tones:
Here are the pitch contours and the correlated Middle Chinese tones:
I don’t the think third tone of standard Mandarin is represented by any of these tones. Which one do you say it is?
April 20th, 2006 at 7:17 am
“There is no tone in Mandarin that is not in Taiwanese, but the reverse is not true.”
That is incorrect. Taiwanese has no equivalent of the third tone in Mandarin. The Mandarin spoken in Taiwan has been influenced by Taiwanese, and people don’t inflect the third tone the same way as standard Mandarin speakers do. You are correct that the speech in the recording is standard. However, the majority of Taiwanese people don’t speak like that, and Mark’s story about a tutor who couldn’t identify the tones is very, very easy for me to believe.
July 9th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
In standard Mandarin (putong hua) as spoken by TV announcers in the People’s Republic of China, what are the tone sandhi rules governing three or more third tones in succession?