Learning to read Chinese characters is a very complex and time-consuming process. Chinese Pinyin is created to assist learning to read Chinese Characters. Pinyin uses letters of the alphabet to provide the phonetic representations of Chinese characters. There are tone marks included in the Pinyin spellings in order to provide the most accurate pronunciations for the characters they represent. Changes in the tones can completely change the meanings of of the characters or phrases.
Click here for a website for practicing different tones of all the possible Chinese syllables.