Anyone that is a native European language speaker that hasn't tried to learn Chinese or some other tonal language, its really hard to understand how hard it is. The tones can really be very subtle, and your ear is not fine tuned to them. So you think you are saying it right, but native speakers have no idea what you are saying.

Agree. It’s really hard. It also explains why a lot of people born in China tend to make serious pronunciation errors when speaking English or German. They are used to focus on different things than us westerners.

It took me very long time to really understand how impersonating tone is in Chinese.

For someone who hasn't grown up speaking an language with tones or pitches, the process of learning them can be maddening. I applaud anyone who makes tools like this to try to make the process easier.

My experience in learning Japanese pitch accent was eye-opening. At the start, I couldn't hear any difference. On quizzes I essentially scored the same as random guessing.

The first thing that helped me a lot was noticing how there were things in my native language (English) that used pitch information. For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.

The next part was just doing lots of practice with minimal pairs. Each time I would listen and try my best to work out where the pitch changed. This took quite a lot of time. I feel like massed practice (many hours in a day) helped me more than trying to do 10 minutes regularly. Try to hear them correctly, but don't try too hard. I didn't have any luck with trying harder to 'understand' what was going on. I liken it to trying to learn to see a new color. There isn't much conscious thought.

The final piece of the puzzle was learning phrases, not individual words, that had pitch changes. For example: "yudetamago" could be boiled egg or boiled grandchildren. Somehow my brain just had a much easier time latching on to multi-word phrases instead of single words. Listening to kaki (persimmon) vs kaki (oyster) again and again seemed much harder.

Of course, your mileage may vary with these techniques. I already spoke decent Japanese when I started doing this.

Wholeheartedly (or maybe downheartedly?) agree with this - sometimes I try to say the simplest things and people just stare at me like I'm speaking Martian. Which I suppose I might as well be! One of my big problems is implicit use of tones for things like expressing uncertainty; that's a very difficult habit to get out of.

The tones are really not as difficult as people make them out to be.

90% of the effort in learning any language is just learning massive amounts of vocabulary.

Things like tone and grammar are the very basics that you learn right at the beginning.‡ Beginners complain about them, but after a few months of studying Chinese, you should be fairly comfortable with the tones. Then, you spend years learning vocabulary.

The two things that make Chinese difficult are:

1. The lack of shared vocabulary with Indo-European languages (this obviously doesn't apply if your native language is something with more shared vocabulary with Chinese).

2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).

‡. The same goes for grammar issues (like declension and conjugation) that people always complain about when learning Indo-European languages. These are the very basics that you learn early on. Most of the real effort is in learning vocab.

I'm a native Russian speaker, and I decided to learn Mandarin, because it's linguistically almost the opposite of Russian.

I had no problems with tone pronunciation, but tone recognition was indeed much trickier. I still often get lost when listening to fast speech although I can follow formal speech (news) usually without problems.

its critical because without proper tonal enunciation the words can be ambiguous.