Afraid to try out your Chinese pronunciation? Some say that Mandarin Chinese is so hard to learn. They say the phonetic system pushes you so far from your comfort zone that it makes pronunciation a nightmare.
All Chinese words have a tone of some sort. The Chinese language has four pronounced tones, which in pinyin are marked with a little symbol above the vowel to which they relate, and a short, less pronounced tone, called the ‘light tone’, which is given no tonal marker (see table below).Tone plays a very important role in the meaning of the characters. Different tones in pinyin will lead to different character and meaning of each Chinese word.