For most of the people who learn to speak Chinese, the tones are the scared parts in the process of learning Mandarin Chinese. They think that Chinese tones are really hard to learn. Almost every Chinese teacher will regard the tones as the top one thing when teaching Chinese language. Even so, many students will still have many tone problems until they are in senior grades.

Some students who are going to lean Mandarin will ask, “Are tones really that difficult to learn?” The answer is yes. We have already been adapted to the four tones as the native speakers, but for the language users who have never had contact with tones, this will be quite awful. Although their mother tongues have tones, one will also feel disturbed to learn another tone language. For example, Putonghua has four tones and Cantonese has nine tones. Northerners of course will feel difficult to learn Cantonese.

The students who study in China asked, “Are tones really that important?” The answer is yes. The function of tones is not only to make the language sound beautiful, but also to differentiate the word meanings. For example, “我给你买了”and “我给你卖了”，one uses the third tone “买” and the other uses the fourth tone “卖”, then the meanings of the two sentences are totally different.

One of the students who learn Chinese in China once was asked by the author that which star he liked. The student answered, “这是一个sǐ（死）人的问题。”, which really shocked the author and he thought that he liked a star who had passed away. But after a while, the author understood that maybe the student wanted to say, “这是一个sī（私）人的问题。” See? The difference of one tone will bring such a big problem in communication with others.

As the teachers of the qualified Mandarin program, you can think about that if one of your students becomes the leader in the future and he speaks out a sentence——这是一个死人的问题, when meeting with our national leaders or answering the questions raised by journalists, the influence in world will be very bad. Therefore, when teachers are teaching the students to study Chinese, teachers should pay attention to and make many efforts on the tones.

Then some students will wonder how to study Chinese pinyin tones. If the students are the new learners, the order of the tones should be noticed. Don’t learn according to the order of the first, second, third and fourth, but the order of the first, fourth, second and third. The latter will be good for students to find the exact tone position.

The problem for the first tone is that the pronunciation of many students from Chinese school in China is not high enough. It is also a serious problem, for the function of the first tone is to set the position of the four tones. If the first tone is not exact, the others will be impossible to be pronounced exactly. How high the first tone should be? This can’t be regulated into rules. This is related with the physiology of every person. Teachers can tell your students: pronounce the first tone as high as they can.

The small tip for teachers to teach the students who learn Mandarin in China to pronounce the first tone: teacher can read “mā” with high-pitched, alto and low pitch voices and asks students to feel the differences between the three tones. Then teacher can ask students to pronounce the different first tone in the three voices so that the students can experience the different feelings when the vocal cords were strained to pronounce high-pitched voice, when the vocal cords were relaxed to pronounce low voice. This method can be used to cultivate the ability of students in controlling the vocal cords.

Many other tone problems exist in the process of learning Chinese language. Teachers can conclude in your teaching practice or find from other teaching materials. The teaching of the four tones should be emphasized in the whole process of Chinese teaching. Teachers should take different teaching approaches to help students correct their pronunciation mistakes.