One of the first challenges for the Western speaker of Chinese to overcome in learning to speak Mandarin Chinese is the introduction of tones to a language. In English, a rising or falling tone does little other than indicate emphasis: The whiny “What do you waaant?” as opposed to “What do you want!?” Not so in Chinese. Differentiating between tones is the difference between knowing, for example, whether a person is asking the whereabouts of your mother, your hemp, or your horse. Misunderstand one sentence and you suddenly find yourself in a very confusing situation, especially since most conversations consist of much more than one lingering sentence. Picture the situation:

Xiao Zhang (speaking Chinese of course):
“Do you know where I can rent a horse? I’d like to take a horse along the Great Wall. Want to come along?”

You:
“Um. Run that by me one more time?”

While in practice, context makes a huge difference and it becomes relatively easy to know that Xiao Zhang doesn’t want to rent a mother to take up to the Great Wall, not hearing or saying the correct tone more often than not just leads to confusion. To avoid this awkward situation, here’s a brief primer for how to pronounce the tones in Mandarin Chinese.
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