To represent Yantaihua, we use Pinyin, as it is commonly used for Mandarin. However, syllable-final nasals often remain unpronounced, but clearly nasalize the preceding vowel (e.g. chang1 le ‘intestine’ is rendered “chã1 le”). In Pinyin, the letter /e/ may represent either a schwa (as the /e/ in father) or a high front vowel (as the /e/ in pen). To distinguish the two, I write them as /e/ and /é/, respectively.
Tones in Yantaihua differ significantly from Mandarin. To represent these tones, we number the tones as follows:
Tone 1:   243
Tone 2:   25
Tone 3:   (2)12
Tone 4:   52
The corresponding numbers after each tone above refer to pitch levels, where 1 is lowest, and 5 is highest in pitch. Tone 3 is clearly glottalized (as is the third tone in Mandarin).
There are not many minimal pairs to distinguish tones 1 and 2, and in some cases, the same word may be pronounced with either tone. For example, huo1 and huo2 both mean ‘live’, but chang1 ‘intestine’ is distinct from chang2 ‘taste’.
Other minimal pairs to distinguish tones 1 and 2:
zan1 ‘stand’ vs. zan2 ‘we (exclusive)’