Chinese Pinyin Tone Marks Cheatsheet

Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and in Hanyu Pinyin they are written as marks over the vowel: the macron for the high level first tone (ā), the acute for the rising second (á), the caron for the dipping third (ǎ), and the grave for the falling fourth (à). The neutral tone carries no mark. Tone is not intonation or emphasis — it is part of the word, as fundamental as any consonant. The standard example is that mā is mother, má is hemp, mǎ is horse and mà is to scold, all written ma without tones.

When a syllable has more than one vowel, the mark goes on a specific one, and there is a reliable rule. If there is an a or an e, it takes the mark. If there is neither and the syllable has ou, the o takes it. Otherwise the mark goes on the last vowel. So it is hǎo not haǒ, xiè not xìe, and liù not lìu. A common memory aid is that a and e always win, and o beats u in ou.

The letter ü is a separate vowel, not a u with decoration, and it appears in the table with all four tones. It is written as plain u after j, q, x and y, because those consonants never combine with plain u, so there is no ambiguity — ju is really jü. After n and l the distinction matters and the umlaut is kept: nu and nü are different syllables, as are lu and lü. Where the umlaut cannot be typed, the conventional substitute is v, which is why Chinese input methods accept nv for nü.

Third tone sandhi is worth knowing if you are writing teaching material. When two third-tone syllables come together, the first is pronounced as a second tone, so nǐ hǎo is said more like ní hǎo. Standard practice is to write the underlying third tones anyway and let the reader apply the rule, so do not correct nǐ hǎo to ní hǎo in text.

For typing, Chinese input methods do not require you to enter tone marks at all — you type toneless pinyin and select characters from candidates, so nihao produces 你好 directly. Tone marks are needed when you are writing pinyin itself, in dictionaries, textbooks and language learning material. On Windows, the Microsoft Pinyin IME has a pinyin-with-tones mode, and Alt codes cover the more common vowels: ā is Alt+0257 and á is Alt+0225, though several tone-marked vowels have no reliable Alt code. On macOS, the ABC Extended input source handles all four marks with Option+A for the macron, Option+E for the acute, Option+V for the caron and Option+grave for the grave, followed by the vowel. On Linux, Compose sequences cover the acute and grave, and the caron uses Compose then c. For occasional use, copying from the table is usually faster than configuring any of this.