Mandarin Minutes

As mentioned in the earlier post about Mandarin Chinese being a tonal language (see The Fantastic 4), the 4 tones are represented in written pinyin by marks above the letter or phrase. Some styles use numbers, such as xiao3 to signify that xiǎo is a 3rd tone. Mandarin Minutes uses web ready diacritical marks, courtesy of pinyin.info. For more info on placement of the tone marks, see here.

Here is a more comprehensive and in depth study of the 4 tones.