The Chinese Tone Chart & 5-Level Pitch Scale

Open almost any textbook and you’ll find a Chinese tone chart: four lines rising, falling, and dipping across a numbered grid. It looks technical, but it’s just a way to write down the melody of each tone precisely. Once you can read it, the chart turns vague advice like “the third tone dips” into an exact shape you can copy.

Chao’s 5-level pitch scale

The grid comes from the linguist Yuen Ren Chao, who proposed numbering pitch on a five-level scale: 1 is the bottom of your comfortable speaking range, 5 is the top, with 2, 3, and 4 spread evenly between. A tone is then written as the pitch it starts on and the pitch it ends on (with a middle number if it changes direction).

• 1 = low
• 2 = mid-low
• 3 = mid
• 4 = mid-high
• 5 = high

Crucially, these are levels of your own voice, not musical notes. We’ll come back to why that matters.

The four tones as numbers

Here is the whole system on one line each. The “tone letters” are just the start–(turn)–end pitches on the 1–5 scale:

Tone	Pitch numbers	Shape	Example
First	55	start high (5), stay high (5) — flat	妈 (mā) — “mother”
Second	35	start mid (3), rise to high (5)	麻 (má) — “hemp”
Third	214	start mid-low (2), dip to bottom (1), rise to mid-high (4)	马 (mǎ) — “horse”
Fourth	51	start high (5), fall to bottom (1)	骂 (mà) — “to scold”

Read them out as movements. 55 is a held high note. 35 climbs. 214 is the full dip — down to the floor, then back up. 51 drops like a stone. These four numbers — 55, 35, 214, 51 — are worth memorizing; they’re the most compact accurate description of the Mandarin tones that exists.

How to read a tone graph

On a graph, the vertical axis is the 1–5 pitch scale and the horizontal axis is time, left to right across the single syllable. So:

• A tone drawn as a flat line near the top is the first tone (55).
• A line sloping up to the top is the second (35).
• A U-shaped valley is the third (214).
• A line plunging from top to bottom is the fourth (51).

Notice the first tone takes a steady amount of effort, while the third tone is the longest and most acrobatic — it travels across three of the five levels. That extra length is exactly why the third tone gets shortened in connected speech, a topic we tackle in third-tone sandhi.

Relative pitch, not absolute

This is the single most freeing fact about the tone chart: the numbers are relative to your own voice. Level 5 isn’t a specific frequency you must hit, like a piano key. It’s simply the top of your range. A child, a baritone, and a soprano produce the same four tones at wildly different actual pitches — what they share is the shape and the relative distance between levels.

Two practical consequences:

1. Don’t try to “find the right note.” There is no right note. A first tone just needs to sit near the top of your range and stay level; whether that’s a high or low frequency depends on you.
2. Tones reset constantly. Your “level 5” drifts up when you’re excited and down when you’re tired, and the tones ride along with it. Listeners track the relative pattern, not absolute hertz.

So when you compare yourself to a recording, don’t match the pitch — match the contour. Are you starting high and falling all the way down for a fourth tone? Are you actually dipping to the bottom on a third? The chart is a map of shapes to reproduce within your own voice.

A note on the third tone’s shape

The textbook 214 dip is the full, careful form — what you’d hear if the syllable were said slowly and alone. In real speech the third tone usually appears as a half-third (21): it drops low and stays there, skipping the final rise. So the chart shows you the citation form, but day to day the third tone is really “the low tone.” We unpack this in The Third Tone & the Half-Third.

With the pitch scale in hand, you can read any tone diagram precisely. Before we drill the tones one by one, let’s settle a question beginners always ask — head to How Many Tones Does Mandarin Have?.