Chinese Tone Challenge! Can You Distinguish the Different Tones?

哈囉，大家好！ 哈啰，大家好！ I'm Grace Today let's do a

challenge

! As you know, in Chinese we use

different

tone

s to

distinguish

the meaning of words, as I mentioned in one of my videos, 拿 and 那 have the same consonant and vowel, the only difference between them is that they have

different

tone

s. which makes them have different meanings. So, to understand and speak Chinese you need to be able to hear and

distinguish

tones

. So today let's do a Chinese tone

challenge

to see if you can tell them apart. Before we dive into today's challenge, let's first do a quick review of Chinese

tones

.

If you don't need to review, feel free to skip this part and jump here in the timeline. In Mandarin Chinese, there are four tones and one neutral tone. The first tone is high and low, like 今天 (today) both are in the first tone, so they are both high and low.今天 The second tone is a rising tone. Start low and then go up. Like 學習 (to study). The third tone is the opposite of the first tone, most of the time it is a low tone like 好吃 (delicious). The fourth tone is a falling tone. It starts with a high pitch and then goes down like 下雨 (rain).

The neutral tone is a light and short tone, like 桌子. Now take a piece of paper and a pen and write the numbers 1 to 20, like there. There are 20 questions in total. To test your ability to distinguish Chinese tones, many of the test words were chosen to be more advanced or less common, so you don't have to feel bad if you can't recognize them. For each question, you will first hear a phrase and you will have to focus on the red word in the phrase. I will repeat the word in red again after saying the phrase. All you need to do is write the shades of the red words.

Here is an example and then you must write its tones. Okay, are you ready? Let us begin! Congratulations! You finished the challenge! If you feel comfortable, share your results in the comments below and let me know which shade you find hardest to distinguish. Today's challenge is for you to self-assess how well you can distinguish Chinese tones and discover those you might have trouble with. and improve them Once you can hear the difference between these different tones, it will greatly help you with your pronunciation and understanding of Chinese. Well, that's all for today! so they can test how good they are at distinguishing Chinese tones.

Last but not least, if you want to learn some daily Mandarin expressions, check out my Instagram @gracemandarin 那我們下次見囉！拜拜！ 那我们下次见啰！拜拜！ See you next time! Bye bye!