Tones

The second Great Challenge to learning Mandarin is pronunciation. In particular, Chinese is famous for being a tonal language.

Tones are not hard.

Fear of the tones is a mental block. It stems from the erroneous expectation that you need to master them before you even begin. You don’t. Just suck until you get good at them. With enough listening practice, you will acquire them.

People often claim that if you use the wrong tone, it becomes a different word. It doesn’t. It just sounds like you said the same word, but wrong. This will happen on occasion, no doubt. But for the purposes of this guide, you should be focused on listening, not speaking. The more listening practice you get, the less likely you are to use the wrong tones when you do speak.

Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone. You can find videos and tutorials on them literally anywhere, so we won’t repeat that material here.

Some people advocate for learning pairs of tones, rather than isolated tones. Some people talk about how various rules where tones can change in certain contexts. Some people give techniques for pronouncing tones natively. However, at the end of the day, all of this is learning. Don’t dwell on it.

At the end of the day, tones must be acquired through extensive listening practice.