the English word "new" seems to have the 4 tones in Chinese, but I as not so sure

Native speaker, they all sound the same to me

english isn’t a tonal language, the tone you say it in won’t affect the meaning

English is not a tonal language, but it does have tonic accents/syllable stress, which is what you’re hearing. Stressed syllables have higher pitch

I'm a native speaker of English and also speak Chinese. You do have a point here lol, but it won't be very instructive because people who don't speak Chinese won't consciously perceive the difference. It's true that English does use all of the four tones from Mandarin, although not phonemically, and it can be hard for us to pronounce them on certain syllables if we're not used to doing so. There are other examples that are much clearer than these, like 'what?' for the second tone, and they're commonly used to teach tones.

Fun! I'm a native English speaker, and I would just say these phrases have slightly different rhythms which cause "new" to be emphasized differently (and the speaker can change that emphasis to express emotion, as well). But it's cool to know something like that can approximate Chinese tones! ...It also makes me think a tonal language would be very hard for me to learn, though. 🥲

I had to Google “[the four tones Chinese](https://www.thoughtco.com/four-tones-of-mandarin-2279480)” because I had no clue what you were talking about. In English, tones aren’t really a thing that native speakers need to study or think about. We intone our words whichever way feels natural. We don’t think of it as a different pronunciation. For example, the way I *pronounce* “that” in “That” and “That?” is the same, in my opinion. The way I *intone* “That?” definitely rises to a higher pitch at the end though, as if to make sure you hear the question mark. Apparently in Mandarin, this is known as “the 2nd tone.” It’s not known as anything in English; it’s just how we talk. Questions are almost always put in the 2nd tone. That’s pretty consistent, like a rule. There are no rules for the other tones, though. The way we decide which tone to use is: we simply pick the one that flows most easily with the surrounding words in the sentence. This doesn’t even feel like we’re making a decision. We’re just talking. It’s similar to how we say “the street” but “thee avenue”—which isn’t a rule either, by the way; it’s just easier to say “thee avenue” than “thuh avenue.” You’re totally right, though. I agree with all your observations about how new year, new or old?, New Zealand, and news are intoned.

You’re noticing the change in pitched caused by stress and intonation. Your examples are not perceived as tone (at least on the level of individual words) by speakers. It’s better to think of stress as a complex combination of vowel pitch, volume, and length. Tone is just the pitch part of that. Like tone, a word can only ever have one stress pattern without changing its meaning. Intonation, on the other hand, is a very malleable thing. It’s what’s happening in your second example with a rising question intonation. It exists on the level of an entire utterance, and it never makes the difference between two words. Don’t expect the tone you hear to always be the same for a particular word since it isn’t a word-level property in English.

In English tones are for punctuation, not meaning. Your tone might change a statement to a question. Or make a statement ironic or sarcastic. Or display a particular emotion. Don’t try and put Chinese tones on individual words. It makes you sound like you are singing, and is rather difficult for natives to understand. It’s a common complaint of natives about Chinese speakers of English (mostly expressed by saying Chinese people speak English in a sing-song voice). Your best bet for learning English is to keep your tone flat throughout every word and sentence.

As someone who has studied Mandarin, I think you may be right about examples 2-4, but the new in new year doesn’t sound like a first tone Mandarin syllable to me. It’s not high pitched enough. I think you have to be careful when drawing comparisons between English stress patterns and Mandarin tones, because English doesn’t categorize syllables in the same way as Mandarin. Instead, it’s about how much a syllable is emphasized in comparison to the syllables around it. Good luck figuring out how to remember which stress patterns to use.

Tones do sound like they exist in the speeches of native English speakers, but they are just intonations and these are not actually phonetic characters in English (in other words, they are not a part of the accent) unlike in Chinese. In English, whether you pronounce a certain syllable with a rising intonation ⤴️ or a falling intonation ⤵️ or the pitch stays the same ➡️, it is still phonetically identical and they are "pronounced" exactly the same, just "spoken" differently. That's the reason that people in the comments are saying that these all sound the same, and they are right. When observing an accent, it's CRUCIAL to differentiate between characteristics that are phonetic and characteristics that aren't. English is a stress accent language, so instead of specific pitch movements, it has stressed syllables and unstressed syllables. In "new year," the word "new" has primary stress and "year" has secondary stress. In "new or old," it could be argued that both "new" and "old" have primary stress, but some may argue that "new" has secondary stress and "old" has primary stress. In "New Zealand," "New" is unstressed, the first syllable of "Zealand" has primary stress and the second syllable of "Zealand" is unstressed. There's a website called [YouGlish](https://youglish.com/) where you can hear real examples of native speakers speaking a specific word you search up in a specific accent you choose, so I recommend trying out the word "new" and seeing how the tone is seemingly random and try to build your pattern recognition of how stress works. By the way, even the word "news" (and pretty much any syllable in the English language) is also the same. You say that the word "news" specifically sounds like the 4th tone in Chinese, but try comparing how the word "news" sounds at the end of a sentence to how the word "news" sounds in the middle of a word (like "news article"). You'll hear that the tone will sound different, but still, they are phonetically identical so remember that the tone differences you hear in English do not make them different pronunciations.

"New or old?" is the first word question, which gets a rising tone. If you reversed it to "Old or new?" the rising tone would be on "old". There are also words that vary by emphasis/tone. "Refuse" as a verb is not pronounced the same way as "refuse" being used as a synonym for garbage.

No. It does not.

It’s the same. Just depends on where you are from or the emotion you’re trying to give. English isn’t tonal but it is emotive! We show humor, sarcasm, anger, irritation, all emotion, in how we pronounce the words. That’s the only way we are tonal. The proper pronunciation is the word but if you’re hearing a tonal quality it is because someone is using it to convey an emotion. Not to interpret the words. This is why American humor is so different than English humor. We don’t use language the same way to convey humor the same way. This is why we think British humor is dry. I really enjoy dry humor. I prefer British sarcasm to American, it’s not as obvious. But overall, the tones are for emotion. Not the pronunciation.