Mandarin tone trainer
Mandarin uses pitch to tell words apart, so mā, má, mǎ and mà are four different words built on one syllable — mother, hemp, horse, scold. What you are listening for is the SHAPE the pitch makes, not the note it starts on.
Tap a tone to hear it.
A round plays twelve syllables, one at a time. Pick the tone you hear; after a miss, hear your pick and the right one side by side. At the end you see which tones you confuse, and those come back first next round.
What to listen for
Tone 1, high and level. Held steady, like a note sung and not let go. It is the only one that does not move. If the pitch stayed put from beginning to end, it was tone 1.
Tone 2, rising. Sets off around the middle of the voice and climbs. The lift belongs at the END, the way an English "Really?" tips upward.
Tone 3, low. Drops to the bottom of the voice and stays down there. On its own it dips and comes back up, but inside a sentence it usually just stays low and a little creaky. It is also the slowest of the four.
Tone 4, falling. Starts high and drops fast, like a clipped "No!". The shortest of the four — often over before you have finished deciding what it was.
The tones are easier to hear in real words than to remember as rules. Inkpaper’s graded stories are read aloud, with pinyin and tone marks above every word.