Free Mandarin tones test

A Mandarin tone is a pitch shape, not a musical note. Nobody is expected to hit a fixed frequency: what matters is the shape — level, rising, low, falling — and where it sits inside YOUR voice range. That is why a deep voice and a high voice can both say a perfect first tone, and why a test that only checks "high or low" misses most real errors.

The errors that actually make Mandarin hard to understand are contour errors: a second tone that rises too late and is heard as a third, a fourth tone that starts in the middle and never really falls, a first tone that drifts down at the end, a third tone dipped so slowly that it becomes a rise. This test scores each syllable against the tone it should carry, so a single slip shows up on its own syllable instead of being averaged away.

Most tone tests stop at "mā má mǎ mà". It is a good warm-up — and it is the first item here — but in real speech tones change each other. Two third tones in a row become rising + third ("nǐ hǎo" is said "ní hǎo"). 不 (bù) becomes rising before a fourth tone ("bú shì"), and 一 (yī) shifts depending on what follows. Unstressed syllables lose their tone entirely and become neutral ("xièxie", "māma").

Learners who are perfect on isolated syllables often fail exactly here, which is why the other four items are pairs and a three-syllable word: they test the tone changes and the neutral tone the way they appear in everyday words.

You get three numbers: an overall score, a tone score and a sounds score (initials and finals), plus a breakdown per syllable. The tone score is the one this page is about. Use the bands to decide what to work on: 85 and above is solid; 70–84 is close but the shape is probably soft or late; below 70 is the tone to practise first. The breakdown also shows, syllable by syllable, which tone the engine expected and which it heard — and in Mandarin a different tone can mean a different word.

If the tone score is high and the overall score is low, your tones are fine and the problem is a consonant or vowel — the per-syllable breakdown shows which, and the full pronunciation test checks many more of them. If one item scores far below the others, that tone combination is the thing to drill.

English speakers carry sentence intonation into words: everything rises at the end of a question and falls at the end of a statement, so a fourth tone in a question comes out rising. Stress also gets mapped onto the fourth tone, making stressed syllables fall regardless of their real tone.

Spanish, French and Russian speakers usually have a narrow pitch range in normal speech. Their tones have the right direction but not enough height, so second and third tones blur and the first tone sits too low. Widening the range — exaggerating at first — fixes more than any rule.

Speakers of other tone languages (Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai) hear tones easily but map Mandarin tones onto their own, which do not line up one-to-one. The usual result is a third tone that is too short and a first tone pitched like a mid-level tone.

Work on the combination, not the single tone. If "nǐ hǎo" scored low, drill third-tone pairs until the change is automatic; if "dōngxi" did, practise the neutral tone after each of the four tones. Hum the shape first, then say it, then record and compare — the score moving is what tells you the change stuck.

The tone trainer drills pairs with audio, the pinyin chart lets you hear any syllable in all four tones, and the TonePerfect app builds a daily session from the tones and sounds you actually miss.