Tone Marks and Tones of Pinyin

Tone Marks
The tone is indicated by the tone mark which is falls on the vowel. For a neutral tone, there will be no tone mark on it.

SINGLE FINAL	DOUBLE AND NASAL FINAL
With only 1 vowel, the tone mark will always fall on it.	Medial = “i”, “u”, “ü”
	If the first vowel is medial, the tone mark will fall on the vowel after it.	If the first vowel is not a medial, the tone mark will fall on the first vowel.

Example
na: nā, ná, nǎ, nà
nao: nāo, náo, nǎo, nào
li: lī, lí, lǐ, lì
liu: liū,liú, liǔ, liù

Tones of Pinyin
In Chinese, the tone changes the meaning of the words. There is a total of four basic tones with one special tone which is called the neutral tone.

TONES
1st Tone (－):  Flat tone where the voice needs to be high pitch and flat.
2nd Tone (/):  Rising tone starts with a middle tone then rises higher.
3rd Tone (∨):  Fall-rising tone in which your pitch goes down and rises.
4th Tone (﹨):  Falling tone in which the pitch starts from high to low.
5th Tone:  Neutral tone which is toneless, it is pronounced softly.

Example

TONE		CHARACTER	MEANING	PRONUNCIATION AS IN "ma"
ˉ	Flat tone	妈	Mom	mā
ˊ	Rising tone	麻	Numb	má
ˇ	Low tone	马	Horse	mǎ
ˋ	Falling tone	骂	Scold	mà
N/A	Neutral tone	吗	Question particle	ma