Mandarin Chinese has four pitched tones and a "toneless" tone. 中文有四個聲調和一個［無聲調］。

The reason for having these tones is probably that the Chinese language has very few possible syllables -- approximately 400 -- while English has about 12,000. 中文需要聲調的原因大概是中文只有相當少的可能音節［大約四百個］，而英文有將近一萬兩千個。

For this reason, there may be more homophonic words , words with the same sound expressing different meanings, in Chinese than in most other languages. 因此，和其他語言比較起來，中文有更多的同音字（發音相同的字）。

Apparently tones help the relatively small number of syllables to multiply and thereby alleviate but not completely solve the problem. 很明顯的，聲調的分別多少提高了中文對於同音字的鑑別度。

Learning Chinese in context, therefore, is very important. 因此，學中文相當重要的一點，就是要從上下文去了解真正的含義。