女 nǚ You need to play nv when you play computer. 小 xiǎo

There are 4 tones in Chinese --- even / rising V falling-rising \ falling "v" in "nv" (女) expresses soft "n" in the syllable, while in "niu" (牛) the "n" sound is hard as there is no soft "s" sound in English -- it sounds more similar to "sh" for you... but in fact "x" expresses "soft s" sound while "s" expresses "hard s" sound

in chinese many same words have several different tones and many same pronounce means many different words,so if u people use wrong tones sometims even native chinese can't understand ,because they can't match which word u want to say

it‘s complicated.we use chinese in china,there not only have tones,but also another lauguages exist,we have 54 nationalities,there might be 54 kinds of lauguages,some of them just change pronounce,that kinds of tones from south like guangdong or zhejiang,we can't understand it at all. because the keyboard don't have a word like’ǚ' so we use 'v'.you should read it like‘nǚ’ 小is xiao,shao is 少，totally different.

There are no Chinese dialects which have no tones as all Chinese dialects are almost the same as Mandarin in writing, though they are very different in speech. Many dialects have more than four tones, and in some of them, none of the tones is the same as any of the four tones in Mandarin. It's not true that the tones get higher the biger the number. The consonant in the pronunciation of 小 is kind of like "sh" in English -- as in the word "sheep", but they are not exactly the same.