Podcast 1: The Four Basic Tones

This is the first podcast for “Language Friday.” Every Friday, I will have a four to six minute podcast for learning Chinese. The podcasts will start out basic, but as time passes, more vocabulary brings in more intermediate levels of podcasts.

Download Podcast 1: The Four Basic Tones

Today, we learned how to pronounce:ā á ǎ à
ē é ě è
ī í ǐ ì
ō ó ǒ ò
ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ

These are the five vowels and four tones. As you can see, the accent marks actually show how the tone is supposed to be. The first tone, the flat line, indicates a flat level tone. The second tone is a rising tone. The third tone is a falling then rising tone. And the last tone is a fast-falling tone.

Next week, we will learn about ū ú ǔ ù and “b p m f d t n l g k h j q x zh ch sh r z c s.” These are just a few more sound pronunciation helpers that will ultimately come back to really help you in pronouncing words in the future. We will also just learn a few basic words. So practice pronouncing these sounds a little and you’ll be able to pronounce Mandarin very well in the future!

(If anyone knows how to get rid of excess background noise in audio files, please contact me! I would like to understand how to make podcasts sound better and clearer in the future.)