Mandarin is a type of tone language, i. e., the tones are part of the phonemic make‐up of words (1). Basically, there are four tones in Mandarin. On the basis of the fact that the four individual tones in Mandarin have almost fixed patterns on their pitch variations, we have designed a real‐time, speaker‐independent pitch extraction and four‐tone recognition system for isolated Mandarin speech: The pitch periods are extracted from the zero‐crossing interval sequence of speech; and the recognition algorithm is derived from the analysis of pitch contours of the four tones.