How to remember Chinese tones
Why tones are the first thing to slip, what the research says helps, and how to tie each word's tone into the way you remember it.
You learn 米饭 (mǐfàn, rice). A week later you remember what it means and how it sounds, but was it mǐ or mì? Tones are usually the first detail to go, because they’re the most abstract part of a word: the meaning has a picture and the sounds have letters, but the tone is a pitch you have to remember on top.
What helps most is tying each word’s tone into how you remember that word, from the first time you see it.
The four tones, in one minute
Mandarin has four tones and a light neutral tone. The same syllable with a different tone is a different word.
| Tone | How it sounds | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | High and level, like holding a note | mā 妈, mother |
| 2nd | Rising, like asking “what?” | má 麻, hemp |
| 3rd | Low and dipping | mǎ 马, horse |
| 4th | Falling sharply, like a firm “no!” | mà 骂, to scold |
| Neutral | Short and light | ma 吗, the question word |
What helps tones stick
Learn the tone with the word, from day one
If you learn a word’s sounds first and plan to add the tone later, you’ll already have remembered it without one. Say every new word out loud with its tone, and listen to it said properly as you learn it.
Learn whole words
Most Mandarin words are two syllables, and tones sound different next to each other. Learn 米饭 as mǐfàn, a dip then a fall, the way you’ll hear it said.
See the tone
Visual cues help. In the biggest study of this, 303 English-speaking beginners trained online for three weeks, and every kind of visual cue helped them learn tones: pitch-shape marks, tone numbers and colour (Godfroid et al., 2017). Marks and numbers did slightly better than colour, and two cues together were no better than one. So pick one way of seeing tones and use it consistently.
Put the tone in the picture
The researchers suggest colour works best when it’s built into the picture, where it makes something abstract concrete. Colour-coded memory pictures follow that idea: if 3rd-tone words are green, then mǐ’s bowl is green, and recalling the picture brings back the tone. We haven’t found a study that tests colour inside a memory picture, so this part is our own step from the research.
What makes a memory picture work in the first place is well tested, and flashcards with pictures goes through it.
Test yourself on the tone, at spaced intervals
When a card comes up, say the word out loud, tone and all, before you check the answer. Recalling something yourself fixes it far better than rereading it (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006), and spacing those reviews out is the best-supported way to make it last (Cepeda et al., 2006).
How Flashfriend does it
Flashfriend gives each tone a colour: 1st red, 2nd orange, 3rd green, 4th blue and neutral grey. Every syllable on every card is coloured by its tone, characters and pinyin both.
Then the colour goes into the picture. When you make a card, you pick a place for the word’s first sound and a scene from a phrase that sounds like it, and something in the picture takes the colour of the word’s first tone. For 米饭 (mǐfàn), “fàn” sounds like “fan”, so the picture has a fan, and mǐ is 3rd tone, so the rice bowl is green.
Every word has audio, with a Slowly button so you can hear each tone clearly, and you’re tested on each word just before you’d forget it. Once you know enough words, you read them in sentences, still coloured by tone, with one new word in each, and grammar arrives one pattern at a time. If you’d rather keep tone colours out of your pictures, turn them off in Settings › Memory boosters.
Read more about Flashfriend for Mandarin, or about the memory techniques behind every card.
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