7 kinds of tone problems and what to do about them

Mastering Mandarin tones takes time, and different learners face different challenges. Understanding what kind of problem you face and how to fix it is key to improving pronunciation and communication.

Tones are an integral part of Mandarin pronunciation. Even if this is not hard to grasp intellectually, it can still be hard to feel as a second language learner.

The best analogy I know is to compare with similar-sounding vowels in English. For example, many Chinese people find it hard to both hear and pronounce the difference between “bit” and “beat”. This difference is obvious to a native speaker of English. Similarly, tones in Mandarin feel obvious to a native speaker, yet arbitrary to many second-language learners.

Still, learning tones in Mandarin is not optional. You can no more ignore tones in Mandarin than you can vowels in English. While it’s possible to understand someone with bad tones, just like it’s possible to understand someone who says “bit” instead of “beat”, this certainly makes communication harder.

For more about tones, please check my complete guide to Mandarin tones here: The Hacking Chinese guide to Mandarin tones.

The Hacking Chinese guide to Mandarin tones

7 different kinds of tone problems and what to do about them

As a learner, you will encounter many different kinds of tone problems on your way to mastery. Naturally, you might struggle with a certain tone, most commonly the third tone, second tone or neutral tone, but here I’m talking about different kinds of problems, not specific mispronunciation.

For example, not being able to hear the correct tone is different from not being able to say it yourself, and being able to pronounce a tone in isolation is not the same as being able to reliably produce it in demanding contexts.

To know how to deal with tone problems, you first need to know what the problem is!

Below, I have listed seven problems students have when learning Mandarin. I have sorted them loosely in the order they are usually encountered, but that might vary from person to person:

1. Not hearing the tones
2. Not being able to produce basic tones
3. Not being able to produce tones in contexts
4. Not remembering the correct tone
5. Not being aware of phonological rules
6. Mixing up tones and intonation
7. Falling back to old habits in demanding situations

1. Not hearing the tones

The first problem is the most obvious one. Your teacher tells you that syllables have different tones and mean different things, but to you, mā, má, mǎ and mà all sound the same. Or some combinations of them sound the same. Or you can hear that there is a difference but you do not know what it is and cannot use it to reliably tell the tones apart.

That is okay! Teaching your brain to hear the difference between the tones requires varied exposure and practice over time.  This is an area I have researched extensively, so check this article for more about how to learn to hear tones and new sounds.

Learning to hear the sounds and tones in Mandarin

2. Not being able to produce basic tones

Even if you can hear the tones, you might not be able to reliably produce them accurately. To learn this, you need to do two things: mimic native speakers and get corrective feedback.

First, just mimic the way a native speaker pronounces the tones (from your textbook or teacher if you are a beginner). Record yourself, compare, and try again. In my pronunciation course, there is a lesson specifically about mimicking, and this lesson is available in full on YouTube for free:

Second, you need feedback from a native speaker, preferably a competent teacher. I cannot stress the importance of this enough; you cannot count on hearing if your own tones are good or not! Try playing tone bingo (works with non-teachers too).

A smart method to discover problems with Mandarin sounds and tones

3. Not being able to produce tones in contexts

Most words in Mandarin have two syllables and even single-syllable words are rarely pronounced in isolation. Thus, learning single tones is not enough.

As a beginner, you should spend the bulk of your tone training time on tone pairs. There are only twenty possible combinations and by mastering these, you will know almost everything you need to know to communicate well.

This is also covered in my pronunciation course, although only a sneak peek is available for free on YouTube:

Naturally, you also need to be able to pronounce tones in chunks longer than two syllables, but this is comparatively easy if you have already mastered tone pairs, so that’s where you should invest most of your time.

4. Not remembering the correct tone

To be able to pronounce a word correctly, you need to know what combination of tone(s) it has. While it’s not strictly necessary to be able to be able to name the tones (“this is a third tone followed by a second tone”), it is necessary that you have internalised the correct tone combination.

Essentially, if you aim for the wrong tone(s), you are almost certainly going to make a mistake. Maybe you forgot what tone(s) the word has, or you haven’t learnt it yet.

This problem is not the same as not being able to pronounce the tone(s), but it can look similar on the surface. As a teacher, I can’t know if you mispronounced a word because you can’t pronounce that combination of tones or because you simply forgot what the right tones were.

It matters which it is, though, because the remedy is different. If you can’t pronounce the tones, you need pronunciation practice, but if you don’t remember the tones, you need to listen more and memorise the correct pronunciation.

If you struggle to remember tones and pronunciation, I’ve written about a clever method to memorise them here: How to use mnemonics to learn Mandarin tones and pronunciation.

How to use mnemonics to learn Mandarin tones and pronunciation

5. Not being aware of phonological rules

Phonology is the study of how sounds are organised in a language, including how they interact with each other. There are three basic things you need to know:

• How the third tone changes depending on context
• How some words change depending on context
• How the neutral tone works

Beyond that, you also need to know how tones and intonation interact, which is what we’re going to talk about next.

Obligatory and optional tone change rules in Mandarin

6. Mixing up tones and intonation

Both tones and intonation use changes in pitch to communicate, but they are different. Tones are used to distinguish different words and intonation is used to express anything else, such as attitude, emotion, emphasis or to indicate if an utterance is a question or a statement. If you want a more detailed look at this difference, please check the Hacking Chinese guide to Mandarin tones.

Tonal languages have intonation just like English does, and most of the time, it works the same way. For example, people go up when asking questions in Mandarin, and when they are surprised by something, they go up even more. Just like speakers of English do.

The difference is that in Mandarin, tones and intonation share the same means of expression: pitch. This means that intonation can’t just override tones, because then you change the meaning of the words.

For example, in English, you go up when asking a normal question, so on a flight, you might be asked if you want “Tea?”, and when answering, you go down and say “Tea (please)!”.

In Mandarin, you can’t change the pitch like this, because while chá means “tea”, chà is a different word, meaning “bad”.

Instead, you need to maintain the rising tone, but you raise the whole pitch contour. If chá, “tea”, usually starts in the middle (3) and goes all the way up (5), if it’s uttered at the end of a question or in surprise, this might be mid-high (4) and exceed the normal pitch range (6). Similarly, a second tone at the end of a statement is lower than the rest of the statement, but still a rising tone.

For more about this, please check section 5 in my pronunciation course, which is all about prosody (tone stress, rhythm and so on): Hacking Chinese Pronunciation: Speaking with Confidence.

7. Falling back to old habits in demanding situations

Even if you correct all the above problems, mastering pronunciation takes time. Just because you are able to nail tones when practising with your tutor doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to do so when delivering an oral presentation in front of an audience or when trying to impress a cute girl or boy with your smooth tones.

This is frustrating, but expected. I learnt the third tone incorrectly and didn’t know about it for years, and even if it only took a few weeks to fix most of my problems, it took years until I felt fully confident in my ability to pronounce the tone in context. I still make mistakes to this day, more than fifteen years later, although very rarely and I usually notice.

Learning the third tone in Mandarin Chinese

Conclusion: You can learn tones (but it’s not easy)

My goal in this article was not to make it sound impossible to learn tones. It isn’t, but I would be lying if I said that it was easy. You will run into obstacles along the way, and by knowing what these are and how to deal with them, you stand a much better chance of overcoming them

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I've been learning and teaching Chinese for more than 15 years. My goal is to help you avoid making the mistakes I made and those I have seen other students make. Sign up for my weekly newsletter and get a 7-day crash course on how to learn Chinese!

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