The Fourth Tone (mà): Sharp Falling

The fourth tone in Mandarin is a sharp fall: your voice starts at the top of your range and drops hard and fast to the bottom, written 51 on the five-point scale. The shape an English speaker already knows is a firm, slightly annoyed “No!” or “Stop!” — that decisive downward stab is exactly a fourth tone. It’s the shortest and most forceful of the four, and the most common mistake is failing to start it high enough.

What “51” means

The fourth tone moves from 5 (the very top) straight down to 1 (the very bottom). It’s the mirror image of the second tone: where the second rises to the ceiling, the fourth drops from the ceiling to the floor. The fall should be quick and complete — a clean slash downward, not a gentle slope.

As always, “5” and “1” mean the top and bottom of your own range. The fourth tone just needs to span that whole distance in one fast drop.

How to pronounce it

• Borrow the annoyed “No!” Say “No!” the way you would to a dog about to eat something off the floor. Feel your pitch start high and crash down. Put that on a Chinese syllable.
• Start at the ceiling. The fall only sounds like a fall if it begins high. Launch from the top of your range — the same height as a first tone — then drop.
• Make it short and firm. Don’t drag it out. It’s a quick, energetic stab downward, almost punchy.

Try these very common words, dropping hard from the top:

Word	Pinyin	Gloss	Pitch
骂	mà	”to scold”	51, sharp fall
不	bù	”not; no”	51, sharp fall
是	shì	”to be; yes”	51, sharp fall

不 (bù) — “not” and 是 (shì) — “to be” are two of the highest-frequency words in the language — you’ll say them constantly — so a reliable fourth tone pays off fast. (Note that 不 itself changes tone in some contexts, which gets its own chapter.)

The most common mistake: starting too low

English speakers tend to start the fourth tone from the middle of their range rather than the top, producing a weak half-fall. A fourth tone that starts at “3” and drops to “1” has nowhere near the drama it needs, and it can blur toward a third tone (which also lives low). The fix is the same as the second tone in reverse: exaggerate the start. Begin higher than feels natural, then let gravity do the rest.

This is a perception problem before it’s a production one — to an untrained English ear a weak fall and a strong fall sound similar, because, as the overview of why tones are hard puts it, we file pitch movement under “attitude” and stop tracking the details. A live pitch trace makes the difference obvious: you’ll see your fourth tone launch from mid-height instead of the top, and you can fix the start on the next try.

A quick self-check

Say 是 (shì) — “yes” as a curt, confident answer — like snapping “Right!” Then say it limply. The curt version starts high and stabs down; the limp version sags from the middle. Native-sounding fourth tones are closer to the curt version than English politeness instincts want them to be.

How it behaves with neighbors

The fourth tone is stable in shape, and it’s energetic enough to anchor common words like 再见 (zàijiàn) — “goodbye” (fourth + fourth) and 谢谢 (xièxie) — “thank you” (fourth + neutral). A useful pairing pattern: two fourth tones in a row tend to clip the first one a little shorter, but both still fall.

You now have all four full tones. Before pairing them up, we tackle the contrast learners trip on most: Tone 2 vs Tone 3, the rise that’s easy to mistake for the dip.