Most apps that "check your Chinese pronunciation" do one thing: they run speech recognition and tell you whether the words were recognised. That is an accept-or-reject signal, and it is almost useless for tones, because recognisers are built to tolerate bad tones. TonePerfect works differently: it grades every syllable on three separate things and shows you the pitch curve you actually produced. This page explains what that means, what the score does and does not tell you, and how to get an honest reading.
What a Chinese pronunciation app should measure
A Mandarin syllable has three parts, and a learner can get any one of them wrong on its own:
- The tone, the pitch pattern over the syllable.
- The initial, the consonant at the start (zh, q, x, r are the usual problems for English speakers).
- The final, the vowel and any nasal ending (ü, -ang vs -an, -iu).
A single score hides which one failed. If shì scores 60, was it the retroflex sh, the buzzed -i, or a fourth tone that did not fall? The app scores each separately, so the feedback is "your fourth tone started too low" rather than "try again".
How the tone score works
Pitch is extracted from your recording many times per second and turned into a contour for each syllable. That contour is compared against the shape a native speaker produces for that tone in that position (a third tone before another third tone is expected to rise; the same syllable before a first tone is expected to stay low). The comparison is about shape and relative height, not absolute pitch, so a deep voice and a high voice are scored the same way.
You see the result as two curves on one graph: yours and the target. The most common patterns the graph reveals:
- a fourth tone that starts mid-range and barely falls (it reads as a third tone),
- a third tone with a full dip-rise in the middle of a word, where it should be flat and low,
- a second tone that rises too little, which reads as a first tone,
- neutral tones held too long.
How the initial and final scores work
Consonants and vowels are scored by an acoustic model trained on standard Putonghua speech, the Beijing-based pronunciation used in broadcasting and in the HSK. The model estimates, for each sound, how close your articulation was to the reference. It is strict about the contrasts that change meaning: zh/ch/sh against j/q/x, n against ng endings, u against ü. It is deliberately less strict about regional colour that does not change meaning.
What the number means
The overall score is a weighted blend of the three. Treat it as a consistent second opinion, not a certificate: it never gets tired, never says "close enough" to be polite, and applies the same standard every time, which is exactly what self-study lacks. It does not measure fluency, vocabulary or grammar, and it does not know whether your sentence made sense.
Why it is not the speech recogniser in your phone
Siri, Google and the recogniser inside most course apps are optimised to understand you despite errors. A flat mǎ and a proper mǎ both come out as 马 because the system uses context to guess. That is the right design for dictation and the wrong one for learning: it rewards the mistake. A pronunciation grader has the opposite goal. It is built to notice the difference and report it.
Privacy
Recordings are used to score the take and to show you the result. They are not sold, not used to build voice profiles, and you can delete your account and its data from the app at any time. The full policy is on the privacy page.
What the AI cannot do
- It cannot tell you why a listener misunderstood a whole sentence when every syllable was fine (rhythm and stress are not scored yet).
- It cannot grade Cantonese, Taiwanese-accented Mandarin or dialect as if they were the standard.
- It cannot fix a bad microphone. Background noise, laptop fans and Bluetooth earbuds with aggressive noise suppression all lower scores for reasons that have nothing to do with your Chinese.
How to get an accurate reading
- Use a quiet room and the built-in microphone, or wired earphones.
- Speak at a natural pace; slowing down changes tone shapes.
- Record each word two or three times and look at the pattern, not the single number.
- Compare the graph against the target curve before reading the score.
Try it on your own voice
The free 2-minute test records five words and returns a score for each syllable's tone, initial and final, with the contour graph. If you want to see the engine on text of your choosing, paste a sentence into the pronunciation tool.
Frequently asked questions
Is the score comparable between people? Yes. It is relative to a native reference, not to other users.
Does a higher score mean I sound native? It means the measured features were close to the reference. Native listeners also weigh rhythm, stress and word choice, which are not in the score.
Can it grade the neutral tone? Yes; it is scored as short and low relative to the previous syllable, which is what makes it sound right.
Does it work in the browser? The test and the practice tool run in the browser. The app adds spaced-repetition drills built from whatever the test flags.