Reading Chinese Menus: Concepts: Tone marks on pinyin

[kake]

Just a quick one today — I realised that I haven't yet explained how to work out where the tone marks go on pinyin transliterations. First, here's a reminder of what Mandarin tone marks look like and what they mean:

• The first tone is high and sustained, indicated with a macron (e.g. 瓜/guā/gourd).
• The second tone is rising, indicated with an acute accent (e.g. 魚/yú/fish).
• The third tone is falling-then-rising, indicated with a caron (e.g. 水/shuǐ/water).
• The fourth tone is falling, indicated with a grave accent (e.g. 肉/ròu/meat).

The tone mark always goes on a vowel, never on a consonant. As for which vowel, there's a handy chart on pinyin.info, but essentially it just works like this:

• If there's an "a" or an "e", it gets the tone mark (you never get both "a" and "e" together in the same syllable).
• If there's an "ou", the "o" gets the tone mark.
• In all other cases, the final vowel gets the tone mark.

Simple! I should also note that if you can't type the accents, you can use numbers to indicate tones — for example, guā would be gua1, yú would be yu2, shuǐ would be shui3, and ròu would be rou4. The "fifth tone", or neutral/toneless tone, is written either without a number or as e.g. fu5.

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See here for what these posts are all about.

Comments

[eatlovenoodles.blogspot.com]

The fifth tone is often called the neutral tone.

[kake]

Ah-ha, yes, thanks, I don't know why I didn't include that term in the post! I've edited it in now.