INTONATION

Mandarin language distinguishes roughly three degrees of stress of polysyllabic words: main (or strong) stress, medium stress and weak stress, which can be distinctly differentiated in the pronunciation of a word of many syllables. Words of two, three or four syllables have a distinct strong stress on one of the syllables.

In most disyllabic words, the strong stress falls on the second syllable, and the first syllable is usually pronounced with a medium stress, e.g.:

汉语 hānyǔ
学习 xǔexí
再见 zàijiàn

A small number of disyllabic words have the main stress falling on the first syllable, and the second syllable is usually pronounced with a weak stress even though it is normally not the neutral tone, e.g.:

朋友 péngyǒu
认识 rènshi
大夫 dàifu
我们 wǒmen
先生 xiānshēng

When a noun is formed of reduplicated characters the first character receives a strong stress and the second one is pronounced in neutral tone, e.g.:

爸爸 bàbɑ
妈妈 māmɑ