About Mandarin Tones

Mandarin has four lexical tones. The same syllable can mean four different things depending on the pitch contour you say it with — and your ear and voice need separate training for each one. This drill builds that intuition through quick spoken practice.

The four tones

• Tone 1 (mā 妈) — high and flat, like holding a sung note. Pitch stays at the top of your range.
• Tone 2 (má 麻) — rising, like asking a question. Pitch starts mid-low and climbs to high.
• Tone 3 (mǎ 马) — dipping. Pitch falls to your lowest, then rises back up.
• Tone 4 (mà 骂) — sharp falling, like an exclamation. Pitch crashes from high to low.

How to use it

1. Tap Start session. Grant microphone permission once.
2. A character appears with its target tone. A dashed gray contour shows the shape you're aiming for.
3. Say the syllable. The app detects when you start speaking and stops listening when you finish.
4. Your pitch contour appears as a colored line on top of the dashed target. Green = correct tone, red = wrong.
5. The next character loads automatically.

What the sparkline shows

• Y axis — how high or low your pitch is relative to your speaking range. The faint dotted line in the middle is your baseline.
• X axis — time. Left is the start of the syllable, right is the end.
• Dashed line — the ideal contour for the target tone.
• Solid line — your actual contour, colored by the verdict.

Behind the scenes

Your phone's microphone streams pitch into the app at about 200 readings per second using the YIN pitch-detection algorithm. After each utterance the captured contour is compared against the four tone templates; the closest match wins, with feature-based tiebreaks for the ambiguous tone-2-vs-tone-3 case (dip depth, dip-to-rise ratio).

The app learns your speaking range over the course of a session — the first few attempts use a rough within-utterance reference, and accuracy improves once it's heard a mix of tones from you.

Streak

A day counts toward your streak when you log at least 10 attempts. Calendar and accuracy history live on the Account page.