How to Create a Language Word That's Not Mandarin

The language will be spoken by a character that is slightly based on my wife right. It does have mostly dislavic compound words and and contour tones it doesn't have exactly the same contours as Mandarin because like and it evolved the contour in a totally different way. I think it's not getting too hung up on a single feature of the language but thinking about the larger context of what you're creating yeah I do.