Pitch levels are important enough in English that native speakers spontaneously develop ways to write them down, even though the standard written language has no way to indicate them.

However, they operate at the level of the sentence rather than the individual word, which sets up a conflict if an English speaker wants to learn Chinese.

The most common uses of pitch in English are to annotate the grammatical structure of a sentence, making it clear which words belong together in larger phrases, and to mark yes/no questions.

English does have one clear example of lexical tone, the "I don't know" word, which is pronounced very similarly to the Mandarin pinyin éēě. (If pronounced with the mouth open. With the mouth closed, it would be more like 嗯嗯嗯 in the same 2-1-3 tone sequence.)