0.3 Tone 2 and Tone 3 — Epoché
What you will be able to do Produce the second tone as a rise that starts in the middle of your range and ends high, and not as a question. Produce the third tone as a syllable that sits low , and say why the dip-and-rise drawn in textbooks is only its isolated form. Keep 2-3 and 3-2 apart in two-syllable words, which is where these two tones are actually confused. Read six minimal pairs that differ in nothing but the choice between tone 2 and tone 3. Prerequisites : 0.2, the high level first tone and the falling fourth tone. See lesson 0.2 Sounds and Tones . The first and fourth tones were gifts: your voice already made those shapes. The second and third are the work. They are the two tones with no ready English equivalent, and the pair that learners confuse with each other rather than with anything else. A useful way to talk about pitch here is a five-point scale where 1 is the bottom of your comfortable range and 5 the top. On that scale the first tone is a flat 5, the fourth tone is 5 dropping to 1, the second tone is 3 rising to 5, and the third tone is a 2 sinking to 1. Note what that last one does not say. The second tone: a rise from the middle The second tone is written with a bar sloping upwards to the right: má , shí , lái . It begins in the middle of your range and climbs to the top, and most of the climb happens late, in the second half of the syllable. It is longer than a fourth tone and it takes real effort at the end, where an English speaker expects to be relaxing. The common fault is starting too low. If you begin the rise near the bottom of your range you have produced a syllable that sinks before it lifts, and a listener hears a third tone. So the second tone is not simply "going up"; it is going up from the middle . Put your starting pitch at ordinary speaking level, and rise from there. The nearest English gesture is the incredulous single word: Me? when you are being blamed, or Sure? when you doubt it. Borrow the shape and then strip the meaning out of it, because in Mandarin that rise is not a question and not doubt. It is simply how the word is pronounced. The third tone: low, not a tick The third tone is written with a mark shaped like a small V: mǎ , nǐ , hǎo . The mark is drawn that way because of how the syllable behaves when it is said slowly and alone, where it falls to the bottom and then rises again. That is the citation form, the pronunciation you get when somebody is asked what a word is, and it is what recordings of single syllables give you. In running speech the rise almost always disappears. What remains is a syllable that goes low and stays there, often with a creaky quality at the bottom, the sound English speakers make when they trail off with a doubtful well . Teachers call this the half third tone, and it is the ordinary case rather than the exception: the full dip and rise turns up mainly when the syllable is said on its own, or at the end of an utterance when the word is stressed. So the instruction for the third tone is one word: low . If you aim at the drawn shape you will produce a long swooping syllable that sounds nothing like speech, and worse, the rise at the end of it will be heard as a second tone. Aim low, keep it short, and let the rise appear only when you are deliberately ending a sentence on that word. One further fact, held back for a later lesson: when two third tones meet, the first of them turns into a second tone. So 你好 is written nǐ hǎo and said ní hǎo. This is not sloppiness, it is a rule, and lesson 0.5 sets it out. Until then, take it that a third tone followed by another third tone rises. The sounds in a table Six pairs. In each one the initial and the final are identical and only the tone differs, so nothing but pitch is keeping two unrelated words apart. Read down the column of second tones first, then the column of third tones, then in pairs. Where the traditional character differs it follows in brackets. Tone 2 Tone 3 The two meanings shí 十 shǐ 史 ten, and history bái 白 bǎi 百 white, and a hundred qí 骑 （ 騎 ） qǐ 起 to ride, and to rise hái 还 （ 還 ） hǎi 海 still, and sea wán 完 wǎn 晚 to finish, and late shuí 谁 （ 誰 ） shuǐ 水 who, and water The last pair is the one to keep. Asking for water and asking who somebody is are not errors you can talk your way out of, and the only difference is whether the pitch climbs to the top or settles at the bottom. The order of the dip and the rise Alone, these two tones are not hard to tell apart. In two-syllable words they are, because both 2-3 and 3-2 contain a rise and a low patch, and all that distinguishes them is which comes first. Say the words below slowly and watch where the lowest point of each word falls. Word Meaning Notes 苹果 zh píngguǒ · tones 2-3 （ 蘋果 ） apple 牛奶 zh niúnǎi · tones 2-3 milk 美国 zh Měiguó · tones 3-2 （ 美國 ） the United States 好人 zh hǎorén · tones 3-2 a good person 学习 zh xuéxí · tones 2-2 （ 學習 ） to study 你好 zh nǐhǎo · tones 3-3 hello Said ní hǎo: when two third tones meet, the first one rises (lesson 0.5). In a 2-3 word the rise comes at the front and the low patch at the end, so the word finishes down near the floor: 苹果 píngguǒ ends low. In a 3-2 word the low patch comes first and the rise carries the word upwards, so it finishes high: 美国 Měiguó ends near the ceiling. Where a word ends is the test you can apply to your own voice without any equipment at all. The 2-2 row is easier than it looks: two rises in a row, with a reset downwards in the gap, exactly as 4-4 needed a reset upwards. The 3-3 row is the one covered by the rule mentioned above, so the first syllable of 你好 rises and only the second is really low. How This Differs from English English does own a rise and a low fall, but it puts them at the ends of phrases, and it uses them to mean something. A rise leaves a turn open: it asks, or it lists, or it invites you to keep listening. A low fall closes a turn: it states, and it can sound final or dismissive. Both belong to the sentence, and both carry an atti