How Many Tones Does Mandarin Have?

If you’ve searched how many tones Mandarin has, you’ve probably seen two different answers — four and five — and wondered which source to trust. The honest answer is that both are correct; they’re just counting slightly different things. Mandarin has four main tones plus a neutral tone, and whether you call that four or five depends on what you include.

The four main tones

These are the “full” tones, each with its own clear pitch shape. They’re the ones drawn on every tone chart:

Tone	Pinyin	Hanzi	Meaning	Shape
First	mā	妈	”mother”	high, level
Second	má	麻	”hemp; numb”	rising
Third	mǎ	马	”horse”	low, dipping
Fourth	mà	骂	”to scold”	falling

Every Mandarin syllable that carries stress uses one of these four. When someone says “Mandarin has four tones,” this is the set they mean.

The fifth: the neutral tone

There’s also a neutral tone (also called the light tone, or qīngshēng 轻声). It isn’t a fifth shape — it has no fixed contour of its own. Instead, it’s what happens when a syllable is unstressed: it gets short, light, and quiet, and its actual pitch is decided by whatever tone came before it. Pinyin writes it with no mark at all.

• 妈妈 (māma) — “mom” — strong first tone, then a light ma.
• 谢谢 (xièxie) — “thank you” — strong fourth, then a soft xie.
• 桌子 (zhuōzi) — “table” — the zi is neutral.
• 吗 (ma) — the question particle, always neutral: 你好吗？(nǐ hǎo ma?) — “How are you?”

Because it’s a genuine, contrastive part of the language — 东西 (dōngxi) — “thing” and 东西 (dōng​xī) — “east and west” differ only in whether the second syllable is neutral or a full first tone — many linguists count it. That’s the fifth tone. We give it a full chapter at Neutral Tone: The Light Fifth Tone.

So is it four or five?

Here’s the tidy way to hold both answers at once:

Mandarin has four full tones and one neutral tone. Count only the full tones and you get four. Include the neutral tone and you get five.

Neither is wrong. Textbooks aimed at pronunciation often say “four tones” because those are the four shapes you actively produce; more complete descriptions say “five” to acknowledge the neutral tone is real and meaningful. When you see the disagreement online, it’s almost always this — not a factual dispute, just two ways of counting. For clarity, this course numbers the neutral tone as the fifth and writes it as 5 (so ma1, ma2, ma3, ma4, ma5), matching the tone-number system from reading pinyin marks.

What about the “tone changes”?

You may also hear about extra pitch behaviors — the third-tone sandhi that turns 你好 into ní hǎo, or the shifting tones of 一 (yī) and 不 (bù). These are not additional tones. They’re rules that change which of the existing four (or five) a syllable uses in context. So they don’t raise the count; they just complicate when each tone appears. We’ll get to all of them in the sandhi module, starting with the third-tone sandhi rule.

Why some learners “hear” more than five

Beginners occasionally feel like there must be more than five tones, because the same word seems to come out differently in different sentences. That impression is real, but the cause isn’t extra tones — it’s the full tones bending under context. A third tone before another third tone surfaces as a rise (sandhi); a third tone before a first, second, or fourth tone surfaces as a flat low “half-third”; and a fourth tone can sound softer at the end of a sentence than at the start. None of these are new categories. They’re the same four shapes, reshaped by their neighbors — the way the English plural -s sounds like s in “cats” but z in “dogs” without becoming a new letter. So if Mandarin ever feels like it has a dozen tones, that’s connected speech at work, not a bigger inventory.

Don’t confuse Mandarin with other Chinese languages

One more source of “how many tones” confusion: Chinese isn’t one language. Mandarin’s four-plus-neutral system is specific to Mandarin. Cantonese, for example, is usually described as having six tones (some traditions count nine). Other regional languages — Hokkien, Shanghainese, Hakka — have their own systems entirely. So a confident “Chinese has six tones!” almost certainly refers to Cantonese, not the Mandarin you’re learning here. When you read a tone count online, check which Chinese language it’s about.

Now you know the full inventory: four working tones and a neutral one. It’s time to learn each one properly — start with the steady, high foundation in The First Tone: High and Level.