The "she(1)ng diao", that is the four sounds or tones are marked on vowels. These markings are called tone graphs. There are some characters without the four sounds or tone symbols. These are the base words or qi(1)ng she(1)ng.

The Chinese names of plants in Mandarin used in these web pages make use of the four sounds of the Chinese characters illustrated above.

The (1), (2), (3) and (4) in the brackets denote the four intonations or "she(1)ng diao" of the vowels directly before those bracketed numbers, for example, ba(1) means "eight", ba(4) means "rake", ma(3) means "horse and ma(4) means to scold. Tone graphs can also be marked with symbols directly above the vowels. If there is a tone graph on i, the dot is omitted. The four symbols for the tone graph together with the intonations of the symbols is shown in the illustration above.