Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, in which every syllable is assigned a tone that has a lexical meaning. Therefore tone recognition is very important for Mandarin speech. This paper presents a method for continuous speech tone recognition. Context‐dependent discrete hidden Markov models (HMM's) are used taking into account the tones of the syllables on both sides, and special efforts were made in selecting the minimum number of key context‐dependent models considering the characteristics of the tones. The results indicate that a total of 23 context‐dependent models have very good potential to describe the complicated tone behavior for all 175 possible tone concatenation conditions in continuous speech, such that the required training data can be reduced to a minimum and the recognition process can be simplified significantly. The best achievable recognition rate is 83.55 %.