Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken tonal language in the world.

Usually, every Mandarin syllable can be spelled with precisely one initial (声母；shēng mǔ) followed by one final (韵母; yùn mǔ).

Mandarin has five tones: high tone, rising tone, dipping tone, falling tone, and neutral tone. Different tones make the syllables, which have the same initial and the same final, have entirely different meanings. We also use ordinal numbers to refer to the first four tones, the four basic tones of Mandarin, which are always the focus of our language study.

Through the vowel “a,” which is also the first yùn mǔ (韵母； final) in Pīn yīn (拼音； Chinese pronunciation), we will learn about a set of rhyming words in four different tones.