To be fair though, if you nail all the other parts of pronunciation/speaking correctly and only get the tones wrong, a Chinese speaker will be able to infer you

To be fair though, if you nail all the other parts of pronunciation/speaking correctly and only get the tones wrong, a Chinese speaker will be able to infer your meaning the vast majority of the time. Half of Korean vocabulary is Chinese, with pronunciation based on ancient Chinese pronunciation, but Korean has no tones and their writing system has recently become more or less completely phonetic. Disambiguation is still not a huge problem for them.