Pinyin Tone Tables

This table shows example characters for each hanyu pinyin syllable by tone. It shows which characters group together, and which combinations of initial, final, and tone are common or uncommon.

The table is organized by pinyin syllable (rows) and tone (columns). Characters are color-coded by frequency: darker text indicates more common characters. Tone 0 represents the neutral tone (light tone).

Data Sources

To generate the table, I used the following data from Chih-Hao Tsai:

• Frequency and Stroke Counts of Chinese Characters
• Mandarin Syllable Frequency Counts for Chinese Characters

I combined them into a table of frequency rank and most common pronunciation for each character (frequency_pinyin_table.txt). That table is the input to a Python script (make_tone_table.py).

The characters are traditional, because Tsai's frequency data comes from a Taiwanese corpus. The syllabary uses simplified characters for the same reason.

Tone Table