音调 - yīn diào - tone; tonality
Tones are a vital part of successfully getting locals to understand what you are saying. I was perplexed once when one of the more rambunctious students in my Chinese 202 class asked the question: "How come you can't understand what I'm saying?! Why are tones so important anyway?" and somehow falsely concluding that those that don't understand what she's saying are somehow dense. The truth is, quite the opposite is true.
#base tones = 4
words containing 'u' sometimes have a special '5th' tone and there are also neutral tones, which makes the total possible pronunciations 6
Simply taking the four base tones into consideration, a simple two syllable
word has 4x4 possible combinations, or 16. An average sentence in English is 15
to 20 words [1], and assuming an average Chinese sentence uses only 15 syllables
(each character is matched orally by one syllable) then the number of
combinations required to pronounce a tonally correct sentence is 4^15 (~1.07
million).
The funny thing about this true story is that our Chinese teacher and most of the class can
decipher what
is said by the seemingly tonally deaf student, most likely because for the
former experience and the latter the focused study of limited words.
I'm not going to pretend you can learn tones after looking at one webpage but let me offer some tips:
1. The first one (a strait line above a vowel in a word) is pronounced by uttering the first consonant of the
word and elongating the second word (which will be a vowel in most circumstances) orally.
Please listen to the word 'ma' being read in the following tones:
1st tone mā ma1 (listen!)
2nd tone má ma2 (listen!)
3rd tone mǎ ma3 (listen!)
4th tone mà ma4 (listen!)
References
[1]unisa.edu
(University of South Australia)