There is a specific search people make when they have hit the tone wall: what software can show my Mandarin tones and tell me what to correct? Not "teach me tones" — they have watched the videos. They want to see the shape of what they just said, next to the shape it was supposed to be.
That is a narrower request than it sounds, and most Chinese apps do not meet it. Here is what is actually available, checked on 10 August 2026 against each vendor's own pages and store listings.
Three things people mean by "show my tones"
Before comparing, it helps to separate three different features that get described with the same words.
Tone marks and colours. The app colour-codes pinyin by tone: mā in red, má in green, and so on. Useful for reading. Tells you nothing about your voice.
A tone verdict. The app records you and marks a word or character right or wrong, sometimes colouring the character green or red. Better. Still one bit of information.
A pitch contour. The app plots the actual fundamental frequency of your voice across the syllable and draws it against the target curve. This is the one people are searching for, and it is rare.
What each app actually offers
| App | Records you? | What you get about tone |
|---|---|---|
| Pleco | No | Tone marks and colours in the dictionary; audio playback |
| Pinyin Trainer (trainchinese) | No | Tone-discrimination drills and tone sketching by finger — recognition, not production |
| Skritter | No | Character handwriting with SRS; audio playback only |
| Du Chinese | No | Pinyin display over graded text; narration |
| HelloChinese | Yes | Speech recognition that "corrects your pronunciation"; granularity not published |
| LingoDeer | Speaking practice modules exist | No published pronunciation score |
| Rosetta Stone | Yes (TruAccent) | Voice recognition; no published contour or granularity |
| Ka | Yes | Tells you if you mispronounce a word or tone; lets you compare to the recording |
| Super Chinese | Yes | Per-character green/red, tone-aware, inside lessons |
| TonePerfect | Yes | Pitch curve against the native contour, plus separate initial, final and tone scores per syllable |
Two honest notes on this table. First, absence from a vendor's marketing is not proof a feature does not exist — it only means it is not advertised, and a feature nobody advertises is usually not the point of the product. Second, several of these apps are excellent at what they do advertise. Skritter is the best handwriting trainer in Chinese and holds HSK 1–6 and HSK 3.0 levels 1–9 decks. Pinyin Trainer's tone-sketching drill is a genuinely clever way to train your ear. Neither is trying to grade your voice.
Why the curve beats the verdict
Say 好 (hǎo, "good"). Third tone: the pitch should fall, sit low, and rise slightly at the end when the syllable stands alone.
Now consider three learners who all get marked "wrong":
- One says a flat mid-level tone. The curve is a horizontal line.
- One dips beautifully and never comes back up. The curve is a descending ramp.
- One starts low and rises. The curve looks like a second tone — they have said háo.
Three different problems. Three different fixes. One identical red X.
The same applies to the most-cited minimal set in Mandarin:
| Pinyin | Hanzi | Meaning | Contour |
|---|---|---|---|
| mā | 妈 | mother | high and level |
| má | 麻 | hemp, numb | rising |
| mǎ | 马 | horse | falling then rising |
| mà | 骂 | to scold | sharply falling |
Same initial m-, same final -a. Everything that distinguishes these four words is the shape of the line. An app that cannot draw the line cannot show you the difference between your attempt and the target — it can only tell you that a difference existed.
Separating the tone from everything else
There is a second problem that a contour alone does not solve. When an app says a syllable is wrong, the tone may not be the culprit at all.
A Mandarin syllable has three independently breakable parts:
- the initial — the opening consonant: zh, ch, sh, j, q, x, z, c, s
- the final — the vowel or cluster: -ao, -ing, -üe, -uo, -an
- the tone — the pitch contour
Take 学习 (xuéxí, "to study"). A learner can produce both tones perfectly and still be misunderstood because the x- came out as sh- and the -üe lost its rounding. Show them a tone contour and they will conclude, reasonably and wrongly, that their pronunciation is fine.
This is why TonePerfect reports the three components separately for every syllable rather than issuing one score. You find out whether the problem was pitch, consonant, or vowel — which is the difference between drilling the right thing and drilling for a month with no improvement.
You can see what that looks like on your own voice with the free Chinese pronunciation test, which runs in a browser with nothing to install.
What about phonetics software?
Praat, the standard free tool in academic phonetics, will plot your pitch track accurately and in far more detail than any learning app. Some learners genuinely use it.
The catch is that Praat does not know what you were trying to say. It will not align your pitch track to the syllables of a target sentence, will not flag which syllable was off, and will not distinguish a tone error from a vowel error. You get a measurement and no interpretation. That is exactly right for a researcher and exactly wrong for someone with twenty minutes before their lesson.
How to actually use a contour view
Seeing the curve is not the point. Changing it is. A workflow that works:
- Pick one syllable, not a sentence. Start with the tone you are least confident about — for most learners it is the third.
- Say it in isolation and look at the shape. Not the score. The shape.
- Exaggerate deliberately in the wrong direction. If your third tone is flat, overshoot the dip until the curve looks silly. The correct version usually sits between your original attempt and the exaggeration.
- Put it back in a word, then a sentence. Tones behave differently in context — two third tones in a row change, as in 你好 (nǐ hǎo), which is actually said níhǎo. Our guide to third tone sandhi covers the rules you will run into.
- Then stop looking. The picture is scaffolding. Once you can hit the shape without it, work by ear.
If you are still building the underlying map of which syllables exist at all, the interactive pinyin chart is the better starting point — hear each syllable in all four tones before you try to produce them.
The short version
If you want colour-coded pinyin, almost any Chinese app will do. If you want a right-or-wrong verdict on a spoken word, several will — Ka and Super Chinese both do it, and Rosetta Stone has voice recognition built into its course.
If you specifically want to see your pitch curve next to the target, and be told whether the fault was the tone or the consonant underneath it, that is a much smaller field. Of the apps we checked, TonePerfect is the one that publishes it.
Test it on a sentence you use every week rather than a textbook phrase. Paste your own text into the practice tool, say it out loud, and look at the shapes. The gap is usually not where you expect.
For a wider comparison of what happens after you tap record, see our round-up of Chinese pronunciation feedback apps.