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Mandarin Tones

Buginners Mandarin I (What is this?)

Mandarin Chinese has four pitched tones and a "toneless" tone. The reason for having these tones is probably that the Chinese language has very few possible syllables -- approximately 400 -- while English has about 12,000. For this reason, there may be more homophonic words, words with the same sound expressing different meanings, in Chinese than in most other languages.

Apparently tones help the relatively small number of syllables to multiply and thereby alleviate but not completely solve the problem. Learning Chinese in context, therefore, is very important.