Chinese Tone Trainer

You cannot produce a tone you cannot hear. Research on Mandarin acquisition keeps landing on the same conclusion: learners who train tone *perception* first pick up accurate pronunciation far faster than learners who jump straight to speaking. This trainer drills exactly that — it plays a real word, you name the tone pattern.

The words are real HSK vocabulary across the two-syllable tone combinations, because tones change shape in pairs: a third tone before another third tone turns into a rising tone, a fourth tone before a fourth gets clipped. (3-3 words are deliberately left out of the quiz — sandhi means what you hear is 2-3.) Pairs are how Mandarin is actually spoken. When you can hear the pattern reliably, record yourself in the TonePerfect app and check whether your own tones match.