Notepad, Tones.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was actually pretty freaked out when I read all these posts online about the complexities of Chinese tones and saw them as an extra barrier to learning. But, if we take characters out of the equation for the time being and just look at pinyin (which is, I’m sure, the way it will stay for me for a while!) – the tones actually provide you with a pronunciation guide built into the text – priceless!
Of course, all languages have their punctuation rules and quirks – as does Mandarin, but the added bonus of the tones being present in pinyin is that element of confidence you can have in your pace and pitch as a speaker.
My aim was to get started on learning right away, and I decided that getting an understanding of the tones was an important place to start. I chose a YouTube video I found researching – you can find it here
So this was my first lesson! And I spoke my first words in Mandarin. You might find my interpretations on what I learned interesting, and after ‘lesson’ one I am feeling really inspired about continuing to learn more and more.
I have found that it’s really useful to watch/listen to your video or audio once throughout without taking any notes or pausing to practice. Then go back through a second time and take the opportunities for practice or to use your notebook. I feel hurried otherwise, and that definitely stops me remembering what I’m learning!
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I also realised watching this video, that it’s the first time I really listened to how the Chinese language sounds. It felt odd trying to recreate the sounds, but once you try and get rid of that initial fear – it feels great.
Those scary looking characters begin to make a little sense once you break them down. Each character represents a syllable; and each syllable is composed of: An ‘initial’ a ‘final’ and a tone. I found it helpful to think of these as the 3 stages of pronunciation. This is as much as I’ve grasped about initial, and final – the focus of this tutorial was on the tones themselves – so I won’t dwell on those now or I’ll confuse myself (never mind anyone else).
There are 4 Tones. Each tone indicates the variations in pitch whilst speaking. So as well as vocabulary, grammar and accent – it’s important that intonation is correct. It’s pretty wild how what is essentially the same word, can be given a completely different meaning through a small tweak in tone.
When you look at pinyin text, you can see the tones marked at the top of the text, similar to accents in French, for example.
Wǒ bù tài xiǎng hē kělè. 
I don’t think it would be possible to understand what this sounds like until you hear a native speaker explain it to you. But as you listen you’ll be able to come up with words in your own language/accent that mirror the sound of the tone (not the pronunciation of any associated pinyin). I’ve done just that as you will see from my notes at the top of the post, I took suggestions from the you tube tutorial and blended it with examples that I use in my day to day speak, so when I forget how the tone should sound, I have a point of reference.
The relative pitch and duration of each tone is also important, but I think that’s more than I can cope with for one lesson on tones!
This diagram from sinosplice.com nicely illustrates the relative pitches between the tones.
The Mandarin Mystery 