Two registers of the voice provide a beautiful bifurcation of the singing voice into two separate categories – a sort of Yin Yang: Weak/Strong, Minor/Major, Feminine/Masculine, Falsetto/Chest, Head/Heart, Dark/Light, Hard/Soft, Negative/Positive, Cold/Warm, Wet/Dry. The wave’s crest being Yang and its trough being Yin. Vulnerable/Aggressive, Soft/Loud, Breath/Muscle, Letting Go/Holding on. Quora How-many-tones-are-there-in-Mandarin Vincent Kong knows Chinese Answered Jul 13, 2018 There are four. And, for your information, if you want to know how to pronounce them, I may tell you a method. If you are currently learning Chinese tones, it will be definitely helpful. The first tone sound high-key. It appears when you normally read “au” in the word “author” or “an” in “anxious”. All characters in first tone has the same key/intonation. For example, “冰” in Chinese means “ice”, and you can use the above intonation to pronounce “bing”, and then you correctly read the character. The second seems tricky. I can’t think of a better one than this: imagine someone told you something ridiculous, and you shout “what?” The intonation of the letter “a” in this word only in this situation best simulates the second intonation. “茶” means “tea”, and its in second tone. So you pronounce “cha” in above tone. The letters “ch” goes like “ch” in “change” but not “charlottes”. Similarly, I will describe the third tone as the intonation of “gle” in “eagle”. “狗” meaning “dog”, is almost the same as “gle” in “eagle”. And the fourth tone goes just like the intonation of “four”. And “四” meaning “four” happens to be in the fourth tone, pronounced like “sir”. If you are a Chinese beginner, trying hard to remember how to pronounce Chinese characters, using similarly pronounced English words like this helps a lot.
** End of Page