Chinese pronunciation guide: tones, initials and finals
The whole sound system on one page — an interactive pinyin chart you can hear, the four tones drawn as contours, and the three sound changes that trip up every beginner: two third tones in a row, and the moving tones of 不 and 一.
Mandarin has around four hundred distinct syllables, and every one of them is built the same way: an optional initial consonant, a final, and a tone over the whole thing. Once you can hear and produce those three parts, no new sound will surprise you — the rest of the language reuses them.
Initials × finals
The pinyin chart, out loud
Every syllable Mandarin uses. Pick one and hear it in all four tones plus the neutral tone — the fastest way to find the sounds your own language does not have.
The a / o / e series — the vowels you meet first.
Select any syllable in the chart to hear it. Nothing is downloaded until you do.
| Initial | -a | -o | -e | -ai | -ei | -ao | -ou | -an | -en | -ang | -eng | -ong | -er |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ∅ | — | ||||||||||||
| b | — | — | — | — | |||||||||
| p | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| m | — | — | |||||||||||
| f | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||||
| d | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| t | — | — | — | — | |||||||||
| n | — | — | |||||||||||
| l | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| g | — | — | |||||||||||
| k | — | — | |||||||||||
| h | — | — | |||||||||||
| zh | — | — | |||||||||||
| ch | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| sh | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| r | — | — | — | — | — | ||||||||
| z | — | — | |||||||||||
| c | — | — | — | ||||||||||
| s | — | — | — |
Empty cells are combinations that do not occur. Audio is resolved through the configured speech provider — with the bundled local mock, playback is synthesised rather than recorded by a native speaker.
The pairs to check first
zh/ch/sh against j/q/x, and z/c/s against zh/ch/sh. Most beginner misunderstandings come from these six, not from the tones.
The three that are written oddly
iu is really iou, ui is really uei, and un is really uen. The full vowel comes back when you slow down — which is why liù sounds like “lee-oh”.
The one with no vowel
The i in zhi, chi, shi, ri, zi, ci and si is not the i of ji. It is the buzz of the consonant held on — hold the consonant and add voice.
Tone contour
Four tones and a neutral one
Pitch belongs to the word, not to the mood of the speaker. Each contour below is drawn on the same pitch scale, so you can compare shapes rather than memorise descriptions.
First tone1
mā
妈mother
High and flat. One steady note near the top of your comfortable range — the sustained “aaah” a doctor asks for. It does not move at all.
Second tone2
má
麻hemp
Rising. Starts in the middle and climbs, exactly like an English “Huh?” when you did not catch what someone said.
Third tone3
mǎ
马horse
Low. Alone and slow it dips and comes back up, but in ordinary speech it is simply the lowest tone: the voice sinks and stays down. Chasing the full dip is what makes learners sound slow.
Fourth tone4
mà
骂to scold
Falling, sharp and short. It drops from the top to the bottom like a firm “Stop!”
Neutral tone5
ma
吗question particle
No contour of its own. Short, light and unstressed — its pitch is whatever the syllable before it leaves behind.
Tone is never signalled by colour alone anywhere on HSK Guide: the tone number and its contour mark are always present next to the syllable, and every syllable carries a screen-reader description naming its tone.
Sound change 1
When two third tones meet
A third tone immediately before another third tone is said as a second tone. The spelling does not change; the pronunciation does.
In a longer run, only the last third tone survives — everything before it rises. And before any other tone, a third tone drops its rise altogether and simply stays low: that is the version you use most of the time, in 老师 lǎoshī, 你们 nǐmen and 好吃 hǎochī.
Textbooks do not usually write this change, and neither does HSK Guide — nǐ hǎo on the page is ní hǎo in the mouth. Say it the changed way from the first day; un-learning a robotic double dip later is harder than learning it right.
- 你好
- Written
- nǐ hǎo
- Said
- ní hǎo
hello
- 很好
- Written
- hěn hǎo
- Said
- hén hǎo
very good
- 我很好
- Written
- wǒ hěn hǎo
- Said
- wó hén hǎo
I am fine
- 老师
- Written
- lǎoshī
- Said
- lǎoshī — low, no rise
teacher
Sound change 2
不 and 一 rewrite their own tone
These two words change tone depending on what follows them. Unlike the third-tone change, this one is normally written down — so what you read is what you say.
bù
not
不 is fourth tone everywhere except directly before another fourth tone, where it becomes bú.
- 不是bú shìbefore a fourth tone → bú
- 不客气bú kèqibefore a fourth tone → bú
- 不好bù hǎobefore a third tone → bù
- 不来bù láibefore a second tone → bù
yī
one
一 keeps its first tone when you count, at the end of a number and in ordinals. Before a fourth tone it becomes yí; before a first, second or third tone it becomes yì.
- 第一dì-yīordinal → yī
- 一个yí gebefore a fourth tone → yí
- 一天yìtiānbefore a first tone → yì
- 一起yìqǐbefore a third tone → yì
一 also has a neutral-tone use between a repeated verb (看一看 kànyikàn), where it is barely pronounced at all. Conventions for writing these changes differ between textbooks; HSK Guide writes them for 不 and 一.
Learn
Work through it properly
The published pronunciation guides go further than this page: exercises, minimal pairs and the practice order that makes the sounds stick.
The Four Tones and the Neutral Tone
Pitch in Mandarin belongs to the word, not to the mood of the speaker. This lesson gives you the shape of each of the four tones plus the neutral tone, then the three sound changes that a beginner meets on day one: two third tones in a row, and the moving tones of 不 and 一.
12 min · HSK 1
Initials and Finals: the Sounds That Will Trip You Up
Every Mandarin syllable is an initial plus a final plus a tone. This lesson maps the system quickly and then spends its time where the difficulty actually is: zh ch sh r, j q x, the vowel ü, and c against s — with a separate diagnosis for English, French and Arabic speakers, because the three groups fail in three different ways.
14 min · HSK 1
The Initials No European Language Has: zh ch sh r and j q x
Mandarin has three sibilant series where English and French have one, and it separates its stops by the puff of air rather than by voicing. This lesson lays out the three rows as one system, explains why the spelling can never actually be ambiguous, and gives four physical tests you can run on yourself without a teacher.
16 min · Foundations
Finals That Blur: -n against -ng, ü against u, e against o
Three distinctions carry a large share of the misunderstandings a foreign speaker causes: the two nasal endings, the two rounded vowels, and the letter e when it stands alone. Each is a matter of one muscle in a fixed position, and each can be checked in a mirror. The lesson also opens up the three finals whose spelling hides a vowel: iu, ui and un.
15 min · Foundations
The Twenty Tone Pairs: A Complete Drill
Modern Mandarin runs on two-syllable words, so tones have to be learned in pairs rather than one at a time. Four full tones times five possible seconds — four tones plus the neutral — give exactly twenty combinations. This lesson supplies a keyword for each, names the five that go wrong most often, and lays out a five-day protocol that covers the whole table.
18 min · Foundations
Connected Speech: Neutral Tones, 儿化, and Sandhi in Longer Strings
Everything you learned about single syllables changes once the syllables run together. A neutral tone is not the absence of pitch but a pitch handed over by its neighbour; 儿化 is a colour added to a rime, not an extra syllable; and third-tone sandhi follows the meaning of a phrase rather than the number of syllables in it.
17 min · Foundations
What Arabic and French Speakers Get Wrong, Specifically
A foreign accent is not random. Each first language supplies a short, predictable list of substitutions, and once the list is written down it can be drilled item by item. This lesson gives that list for Arabic and for French, names what each language already has that helps, and ends with the error the two share: letting sentence melody overrule the tone of the word.
16 min · Foundations
Tone Changes: What the Page Does Not Tell You
Pinyin prints the tone a syllable has on its own. Once syllables are strung together, several of those tones change, and only two of the changes are written down. This lesson collects the ones that matter now: third tones in strings of three and four, the moving tones of 不 and 一, and the neutral tone as a fact about the word rather than an option.
12 min · HSK 2
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to learn tones from the very beginning?
Yes, because a tone is part of the word rather than an accent on top of it. mā, má, mǎ and mà are four unrelated words. Learning a word without its tone means learning it twice.
Why does 你好 sound like ní hǎo?
A third tone immediately before another third tone is pronounced as a second tone. The spelling does not change, only the pronunciation. This is the commonest sound change in Mandarin and it is not optional.
Are the two dots in ü ever dropped?
After j, q, x and y the dots are dropped because those initials never combine with plain u — ju, qu, xu and yu are all ü sounds. After n and l the dots stay, because nu and nü are different syllables.
Is the audio on this page a native speaker?
It depends on the configured provider. Where a native recording exists it is served; otherwise the configured speech provider synthesises the syllable, and the bundled local mock is clearly labelled as a mock.