There are four main tones to learn in Chinese.
- She does a ridiculous and misleading two-part pronunciation. Ignore it.
The difficulties ∞
One of the problems with Chinese is that there's no way to know how to say a Chinese character. It must be memorized.
The reverse problem is true.. there's no way to be listening to a Chinese speaker and write down what you hear to look it up.
A comment by Fredsie on a post on thelinguafranca.wordpress.com (Learning Chinese: How Difficult is It?) really struck home for me.
So you've bought a good dictionary, now how do you find your new
character in it? Typically the characters are listed by sound, but you
don't know what it sounds like do you? First, you have to examine the
character in detail, as it will have an element (called a radical)
which is possibly obvious but could also be somewhat hidden in the
character, or in a mutated form. These radicals will be listed in a
table at the beginning, grouped by the number of "strokes" in them. But
what counts as a stroke? Every line in a character is not a separate
stroke; some are, but some apparently two-stroke parts are written
continuously. Assuming you find your radical (by no means a certain
prospect for a beginner!) , you then need to look up the radical in
another table to find the rest of your character, again sorted by
stroke number. This will give you an index to the page number on which
your character will hopefully be found.
Pinyin is the dominant way to write down Chinese using our common roman characters. There are two ways to record the different tones.. the ways the voice is changed when speaking.
The first is using a diacritic (an accent symbol over a letter). The second is following the word with a number.
|Tone Number||Diacritic||Vowels||Diacritic Name||Type of tone|
|1||¯||ā (ɑ̄) ē ī ō ū ǖ Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū Ǖ||Macron||Flat or High|
|2||´||á (ɑ́) é í ó ú ǘ Á É Í Ó Ú Ǘ||Acute accent||Rising or High-Rising|
|3||ˇ||ǎ (ɑ̌) ě ǐ ǒ ǔ ǚ Ǎ Ě Ǐ Ǒ Ǔ Ǚ||Caron||Falling-Rising or Low|
|4||`||à (ɑ̀) è ì ò ù ǜ À È Ì Ò Ù Ǜ||Grave accent||Falling or High-Falling|
|5||n/a||a (ɑ) e i o u ü A E I O U Ü||n/a||Neutral|
I've heard the fifth tone described as "short and sharp".
The fifth tone is sometimes written with a dot ( · ) before the syllable; for example, ·ma.
This'll get updated as I review additional stuff.