How are tones in Chinese depicted so that the word makes sense and the sentences

[Ruckus Jorgee]

are grammatically correct? Chinese has 5 tones. The first pitch is high. The second tone is rising. The third tone is rising and then falling and the fourth tone is falling and the fifth tone is neutral. I don't know anything much about Chinese so please show me an example of a sentence. Then show me what happens if I were to say everything in the high tone, then the rising tone, then the falling and then rising tone, and then the falling tone, and then the neutral tone and then see how everything would sound out and then put words in random tones in Pinyin and see how would it sound. Would it sound like gibberish or just incorrect Chinese?

 

[Handsome Chuck]

To answer the last question, it would depend on what you were trying to communicate and whether or not your your listener had a good context. For example, if you are at a fish market extending money toward the fishmonger and you say,"I want to buy 2 yellowfish" correctly, but with completely wrong tones, the fishmonger would probably grok. Also, if it is something simple or an appropriate set phrase, you would probably be figured out by anyone reasonably intelligent.

 

[Heads On Sticks]

The most common mistake is to think that the tones are, or can be arbitrarily assigned to words in Mandarin. I could try to equate tones in mandarin to intonation and stress in English, but it's just not the same. Tonal languages use tones as a critical component in word meaning, if the tone is wrong, it is not the same word, almost like the difference between "career" and "car ear" in English.

Of course, tones based on relative pitch, one person's first (or high) tone may be quite different from another's, people who speak certain dialects completely slaughter the standard tones, but that is less important than the fact that they use the same relative tones with consistency, and the same utterances have the same overall tonal "shape", so it is easy to guess at what they mean.

Toneless Mandarin, or Mandarin with incorrect tones, or randomly assigned tones might be semi-intelligible at times, but it would require great effort from the listener, who would quickly grow weary or impatient with the situation (imagine someone randomly assigning stress and intonation to English). Other times such speech would be completely incomprehensible nonsense.

As far as your request, you can listen to the following on this site:[1]. By copying and pasting the following text, you can hear Mrs. Lin here do the following:

??,????: Correctly pronounce this sentence meaning: "Hello, I am a student."

??,????: Hear her pronounce the same syllable groups, but with randomly assigned tones.
??,????: Hear her pronounce the same syllable groups, but all in the fourth tone.

Unfortunately I can't provide you with all the combinations, because not every group of syllables occurs in every tone in Mandarin. "Wo" for example does not occur in the second tone by itself, nor does "sheng".

With a simple, common phrase like this, it would be easy to guess at someone's meaning, in the same way that I could probably get away with "Hell, oh. Eye must you dent.“ (Hello, I'm a student.) But you can probably see how such an arrangement would quickly confuse and or irritate a native speaker.

Hope that answers your question!