Tone pairs

Tone pairs are an important unit of pronunciation to focus on as learner's tones gradually improve.

The concept

Most learners can accurately pronounce the tone of a single syllable after enough practice. But they find that once they try to pronounce two tones in a row, it all falls apart: they get the second one totally wrong, or the first, or even both. Stringing tones together is a skill that needs to be practiced, and the foundation for this skill is to practice every combination of tones in the smallest unit possible: tone pairs.

The logic here is pretty clear: if you can string two tones together accurately, you can build on that, stringing more and more together, until you can do whole sentences. This is not a quick process, however. You're going to need quite a bit of practice, and you should expect this practice to take up a good chunk of your pronunciation practice as an elementary (A2) learner.

The 20 pairs

There are 20 tone pairs because there are four main tones and one neutral tone, but a neutral tone can never be the first syllable in a word or phrase.

	+ 1st Tone	+ 2nd Tone	+ 3rd Tone	+ 4th Tone	+ Neutral Tone
1st Tone	1-1	1-2	1-3	1-4	1-0
2nd Tone	2-1	2-2	2-3	2-4	2-0
3rd Tone	3-1	3-2	3-3❋	3-4	3-0
4th Tone	4-1	4-2	4-3	4-4	4-0

❋ You might be tempted to think that 3-3 doesn't count, because after the tone change it's the same as 2-3. But actually, you really need to practice this tone change as part of a tone pair, so you'll definitely want to practice 3-3 pairs, just like all the others.

Sources and further reading

Websites

• Sinosplice: The Process Of Learning Tones
• Sinosplice: Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills, New Feature: Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills
• Hacking Chinese: Focusing on tone pairs to improve your Mandarin pronunciation
• About.com: How tone pairs can improve your Mandarin pronunciation

B1 pronunciation points