🇭🇰 Cantonese
1 / 6
詩
si1
Click to hear · High and flat — poetry
Hearing all six Cantonese tones
Cantonese carries six distinct tones, and unlike Mandarin's four they include several that sit close together in pitch. Learners often manage three or four comfortably and then blur the rest. This quiz plays a syllable and asks you to identify its tone number, training your ear on the distinctions that matter most.
How to play
- Listen to the syllable as it plays.
- Choose the tone number from one to six that you think it carries.
- Check the feedback — the correct tone is shown immediately.
- Continue through the set and note which tones you confuse.
What you’ll practise
- The high level first tone against the high rising second.
- Separating the mid level third tone from the low level sixth, the pair most often merged.
- The low falling fourth tone, which English speakers frequently hear as simply quiet.
- Reading Jyutping tone numbers quickly enough to be useful while studying.
Cantonese tone contrasts are genuinely finer than Mandarin's, and struggling with them is not a sign that you lack an ear. What helps most is repeated short exposure rather than analysis: hearing the same contrast many times over several days does more than reading a description of pitch contours ever will.