Minimal pairs & tones
Two ear-training drills. Minimal pairs plays one syllable and asks you to tell apart the two that differ by a single sound — the pairs English speakers mix up most (zh/z, ch/c, sh/s, ü/u, an/ang…). Tone ID plays a syllable and asks which tone it was. Both use our own recordings, not a robot voice.
Why minimal pairs first
You cannot pronounce a difference you cannot hear. Mandarin has a handful of contrasts that English ears simply are not tuned to — the retroflex series zh / ch / sh against the flat z / c / s, the palatals j / q / x against those same retroflexes, ü against u, and the front/back nasal pairs an/ang, en/eng, in/ing. Drilling them in pairs (争 zhēng vs 增 zēng) forces your ear to lock onto the one sound that changes.
The second drill is pure tone perception: one syllable, four tones. Tones are where beginners lose the most meaning per millisecond, and a wrong tone is worse than a wrong vowel.
When your ears are ready, move to production: the tone trainer scores a single syllable against your own pitch curve, the tone-pair drills cover the 16 combinations and the sandhi rules, and shadowing does words and whole sentences. Every recording here is ours, so the model you copy is always the same voice.
One more thing worth knowing: our pronunciation scorer compares pitch curves, so it can tell a tone apart but not a consonant. That is exactly why the consonant work lives here, as listening practice.