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Many non-native Chinese speakers have difficulties mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). Statistically, tones are as important as vowels in Standard Chinese.
In bopomofo, the mark for first tone is usually omitted but can be included, [19] [20] while a dot above indicates the fifth tone (also known as the neutral tone). In pinyin, a macron (overbar) indicates the first tone, and the lack of a marker usually indicates the fifth (light) tone.
The national pronunciation approved by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was later customarily called the Old National Pronunciation (老國音). Although declared to be based on Beijing pronunciation, it was actually a hybrid of northern and southern pronunciations. The types of tones were specified, but not the tone values.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Mandarin on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Mandarin in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
A tone split occurs as a result of the loss of the voicing distinction in initial consonants. The split tones then merge back together except for Middle Chinese tone 1; hence Middle Chinese tones 1,2,3 become Mandarin tones 1,2,3,4. (Some syllables with original Mandarin tone 3 move to tone 4; see below.)
The odd-numbered tone classes 1 3 5 7 are termed dark (陰 yīn), whereas the even-numbered tone classes 2 4 6 8 are termed light (陽 yáng). Hence, for example, LMC/modern tone class 5 is known in Chinese as the yīn qù (dark departing) tone, indicating that it is the yīn variant of the EMC qù tone (EMC tone 3).
English: This is a PDF file of the Mandarin Chinese Wikibook, edited to include only the Introduction, Pronunciation and complete or somewhat complete lessons (Lessons 1-6). Does not include the Appendices, Stroke Order pages, or the Traditional character pages.
The tone contours of Mandarin Chinese. In the convention for Chinese, 1 is low and 5 is high. The corresponding tone letters are ˥, ˧˥, ˨˩˦, ˥˩.. A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was devised by Yuen Ren Chao in the 1920s [2] by adding a reference stave to the existing convention of the International Phonetic Alphabet.