I hope you’re excited for this part owing to the fact that it might take a lot of time to get down.
First, there are four tones (click on each row to hear its pronunciation):
| # | name | summary | 拼 |
| 1 | Flat (high-level) tone | high, long and stable | ā |
| 2 | Rising tone | rising/question mark tone; relatively long | á |
| 3 | Falling rising tone | goes down a little, stays low and goes up; oftentimes slightly goes down and just stays low; quite long | ǎ |
| 4 | Falling tone | goes down; short | à |
| 5 | Neutral tone | de-emphasized; short | a |
At the beginner stage it helps to associate the tones with the English way of pronouncing words, such as:
1) Just a flat sound. no intonation. It’s quite common to say “Nahhhh” this way.
2) When you say “huh??” You have this rising intonation, you can think of it as the second tone
3) We don’t use it anywhere in English naturally, so as the picture above demonstrates you should try to replicate a falling rising sound.
4) When you say “No!” you usually emit a short falling toned sound.
TODO // add more explanations here and explain tones sandhi